


stretch my arms into the sky

by neverfadingrain



Category: Pacific Rim
Genre: But He Gets Better, Canonical Character Death, Disability, F/M, Gen, Mako makes Raleigh better, Raleigh is Not Okay, Somewhat, also there is bastardized science, angst angst angst, eventually, grieving process, until then there is angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2017-12-29 22:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1010809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfadingrain/pseuds/neverfadingrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m sorry, Raleigh,” the doctor says. “The neural pathways to your left arm were severely damaged in the battle. We can’t tell yet if it’ll heal on its own, but injuries of this kind are often permanent.”</p><p>Or, the one where Raleigh's left arm is paralyzed in the battle with Knifehead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is my "Welcome back to writing things you actually intend to post, motherfucker" fic, long due after my summer internet hiatus! Massive thanks to zihna for editing and encouraging me to write pacrim fic, and to the lovely ladies Kate, Zoe and Boxy for talking me through ideas!  
> This is very angst-heavy. You have been warned.  
> Also, I am not disabled, nor do I have any close family who is. I make no assumptions that this portrayal is in any way accurate (especially because of the whole nonpermanent damage thing), but I did some research and tried very hard to do it justice. This is what I get for making up my own science.

_stretch my arms into the sky_

 

When he wakes, there’s a long moment where he is whole, _don’tgetcockykidlet’sgokillsomekaijuofcourseIknowwhatyou’rethinkingfuckyeah_ , and a vague smile tugs at his lips. _Yancy,_ he thinks, and almost automatically his mind stretches out in search of another.

There’s nothing there.

No warm presence in the back of his head, no lingering awareness of where his brother is even when they aren’t Drifting, no more laughter and smiles and love. All he can find is a gaping hole where their Drift should be, torn and jagged and bloody in his mind, and that’s when it all comes back.

Knifehead. Yancy. Gipsy Danger screaming. His arm surging with pain. The Conn-Pod being ripped open. Yancy shouting at him. Flashing white teeth filing the sky. Feeling his brother’s pain, fear, love—feeling him die. Pushing all his energy into taking down the monster that had taken his brother. Staggering back to shore. Crashing on the beach. Yancy.

Fuck.

Raleigh heaves for breath as he snaps back to consciousness, gasping. There’s something hard in his throat, and bandages wrapped thick and tight across his chest. His left arm is numb. Somewhere, machines go haywire, alarms screaming in his ears, but it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter, because Yancy’s dead.

Yancy’s dead, and Gipsy’s dead, and Raleigh—

Raleigh isn’t.

 _Why am I still here?_ he wonders, staring up at the ceiling, nearly panicking, struggling to draw breath around the steel bands that have suddenly wrapped themselves around his chest and the object in his mouth. _Why didn’t I die with them?_

A nurse runs into the room before he can find an answer, and gradually Raleigh manages to follow her instructions enough to calm down, relax, let the machines breathe for him until she tugs the tube up out of his throat. Gives him an ice chip to suck on. “Where’s my brother?” he pants, demands, as soon as he can, right hand lashing out to grasp her wrists to force an answer.

It hurts, moving like that, not least because his left arm is in a sling and he can still feel the ache and sting of the burns from the circuit-suit on his ribs, side, shoulder—fuck, pretty much everywhere, actually—and the world tilts dizzily for a long moment until he releases her to lie back down.

A hesitant look crosses her face. And oh, he understands that look, knows that Yancy’s body hasn’t been recovered. She’s worried about how much he remembers, but the truth is that Raleigh remembers _everything._

“Your brother is dead, Mr. Becket,” the nurse says quietly.

It hurts even worse, suddenly, because for all that he knows there’s no way Yancy survived, for all that he _felt him die,_ hearing it aloud is ten times worse. A quiet sob escapes him, the only noise he’ll allow himself to make until he’s alone.

 _(So alone,_ his mind whispers, still searching the yawning gap for something that isn’t there.)

After a while, she leaves, and Raleigh curls up in the narrow hospital bed as much as he is able. His ribs scream at him with every movement, and he’s still got a curiously deadened feeling in his left arm that would worry him a whole hell of a lot more if it wasn’t nearly drowned out by the emptiness in his head.

He cries himself back to sleep, barely able to stomach the idea of being awake in a world without his brother.

 

The doctor entering his room wakes Raleigh up, some indeterminable time later. He’s tall, and balding, probably an Anchorage native. His nametag reads ‘Dr. Blake.’ Raleigh doesn’t want to see him, doesn’t want to see anyone but Yancy.

“Good evening, Raleigh,” Dr. Blake says, gentle as he can. He studies the chart at the end of the bed for a minute, then looks up with raised eyebrows when Raleigh just grunts in response. “How are you feeling?”

Raleigh considers not replying for a minute, then some distant memory of Yancy smacking him for lying to doctors flashes across his mind and he flinches. “Tired. Hurts. Want my brother.”

“That’s to be expected,” Dr. Blake answers. “You took a lot of damage in that fight. Piloting a Jaeger by yourself, on top of all the structural damage—it almost killed you.”

He bites back the retort, the _I wish it had_ that rises up out of his throat.

“We’ve kept you in a medical coma for five weeks now, to let your brain and body start to heal. When you were first brought in, your EKG readings were off the charts—alarmingly so. We wanted to make sure they would level out on their own before we let you try anything strenuous.” Something in the curve of the doctor’s smile, the slant of his shoulders, says he knows just how difficult a patient Raleigh can be. It leaves a funny burning in the pit of Raleigh’s stomach.

He ignores it, though. “And have they?”

Dr. Blake nods, putting the chart back at the end of Raleigh’s bed. “For the most part. We’ve still got you on a drug cocktail to help with the hormone imbalances, but really this is all very new to us. No one has ever lost a co-pilot in the Drift before, so we’re still unsure of what exactly to expect. So far, though, you’re looking good.”

“And my arm?” Raleigh asks, because for the past five minutes he’s been absently playing with the dog tags still around his neck—a nervous tick that Yancy had teased him incessantly for—and it’s only when he looks down that he realizes his hand isn’t actually moving at all. Not even when he focuses on it, on moving his fingers, and they don’t give even the slightest of twitches.

Dr. Blake sighs, clasping his hands in front of him. “From what the PPDC damage reports and recordings of the fight have told us, Gipsy Danger lost her left arm in the fight.”

Raleigh nods, because _duh,_ he knows, he _felt her arm get ripped away_.

“Because the Drift is designed specifically to merge two pilots with their Jaeger, there is a highly neurological component to piloting. It…” The doctor hesitates, a flash of sadness shining in his eyes before he pulls it back behind the professional mask again. “When Gipsy Danger’s arm was removed, the neural connection fed the loss through into your brain.”

“Wh-what does that mean?” he asks, because the doctor is giving a very long explanation but he can’t be saying what Raleigh thinks he’s saying, he just _can’t._

“I’m sorry, Raleigh,” Dr. Blake says. “The neural pathways to your left arm were severely damaged in the battle. We can’t tell yet if it’ll heal on its own, but injuries of this kind are often permanent.”

Raleigh stares at him incredulously for a minute, breath stuttering in his chest, before something in his mind screams _NO_ and he turns on his side, away from the doctor, curling up and closing his eyes. He’s not ready to hear this, to hear that on top of everything else he’s lost his arm. It’s _right there_ , he can see it in front of him, reach out and touch it, so it can’t be gone. _Can’t_ be.

The doctor murmurs another apology and, when it becomes clear that Raleigh isn’t going to turn back around he leaves the room as silently as he entered.

His dreams that night are dark, full of Yancy shouting, his arm being ripped away, his brother dying through the residual haze of the Drift, over and over again. He ends up only getting a couple hours of sleep, and spends the rest of the time staring at the ceiling, shaking and silent, aching with the emptiness in his head.

 

He’s almost glad when he wakes a day and a half later and there’s a familiar figure sprawled in a chair at the foot of his bed—if only for the fact that he won’t have to think about Yancy, about his dead arm, about what it all means for the future, for a couple of hours. He’s been floating in and out of awareness, letting his thoughts drift over the gaping loss of Yancy until the hole in his mind is almost as numb as his arm.

“Tendo,” Raleigh says, and his voice is hoarse with the tears he’d shed in his sleep, his endless calls for a brother who can no longer answer.

The LOCCENT Chief’s head jerks upright, and Tendo stares at him with something suspiciously like relief in his eyes. “Hey, kid,” he whispers, leaning forward and wrapping long fingers around Raleigh’s free hand. “How you feeling?”

Raleigh shrugs. “They got me on the good drugs. Burns don’t hurt so much.” Drugs can’t do anything about the hole in his head, or his arm, but at least he’s not in a lot of physical pain.

Tendo nods. “Good. Glad to see you awake, man. We were all pretty worried for a while, there.”

“Yeah, the doc said they had me sedated for a couple weeks?” he asks, dredging up the moments of yesterday’s conversation that don’t hurt quite so bad. “What happened to Gipsy?”

“Ah,” Tendo says.

Raleigh’s eyes narrow almost on their own, feeling more awake than he has in the past two days.

Tendo runs a shaky hand through his hair, messing up the normally immaculate locks. “Gipsy—she’s gone, man. Done for. The crew doesn’t think it’d be worth it to repair her, not unless we had a guarantee that someone would be piloting her again.” He slants a glance at Raleigh, but there’s no real expectation in his eyes. Tendo, he thinks, understands what it would cost Raleigh to climb back into Gipsy’s Conn-Pod again, even if his arm wasn’t fucked all to hell.

And speaking of…

Raleigh takes a deep breath, tries not to stutter over his brother’s name. “Yeah, no. Not again. I was still connected to Y-Yancy when—I felt him _die,_ Tendo. I can’t have anyone in my head again, not after that.”

Tendo nods, knowing he’d been right. “That’s what I thought, man. No hard feelings, we’ll give her a funeral, treat her with the respect she deserves. Find you something else to do around base.”

“I—“ Raleigh overlooks the assumption that he’ll be sticking around, because he doesn’t know if he can, if he’ll be _allowed_ to stay after he disobeyed orders and cost the PPDC a good Jaeger, a good pilot. He also doesn’t know what he can do, instead of piloting, because being in a Jaeger had been all he wanted to do for the past five years, and he doesn’t exactly have many other skills. He’s good with his hands, good at building things and tearing them back down, but how can he do anything like that with only one arm?

Tendo looks curious. “Yeah?”

“Can you keep a secret?” Raleigh asks, feeling ridiculous as he does it. Tendo’s the master of LOCCENT for a reason—even if he is an incorrigible flirt, a gossip monger and a shameless busybody, he knows when a story is too personal to get spread to the rest of the ‘Dome. In the almost three years Tendo’s been directing their drops, been a friend to him and Yancy, none of their secrets had gotten around base. At least, not because of Tendo.

Tendo just raises an eyebrow at him.

Raleigh takes a deep breath. It feels big, to admit this aloud, like he’s acknowledging the truth of the situation. Like once the words leave his lips they’ll be suddenly, infinitely, more real, and he won’t be able to take them back. The words stick in his throat, so he changes directions. “What are they saying about me? On the base?”

“That you’re amazing, a hero,” Tendo answers softly. Raleigh can barely meet his eyes. “For getting Gipsy back to shore on your own, for taking Knifehead down, for saving everyone on that boat. That your brain’s all screwy from the neural load, that you took a lot of damage in the fight.” He nods to Raleigh’s left arm, numb in its bright white sling across his chest, but there’s no knowing sympathy in his eyes. Not like Dr. Blake, or the nurses who bustle in and out of his room.

He doesn’t know.

Raleigh exhales softly, realizes that he doesn’t want it spread around the base. Tendo can keep it a secret, deserves to know, but no one else. Except the Marshal, probably. (It’s nearly impossible to keep secrets from Stacker Pentecost, and Raleigh’s pretty sure he’s been getting updates since he was admitted to the base hospital, nearly incoherent and convinced he was going out of his mind.

“My arm—the docs say my brain caught the feedback when Gipsy lost her arm in the fight,” he says softly.

Tendo gasps, eyes flicking down to stare at the arm across Raleigh’s chest. “So you’re…”

“Can’t feel much of anything,” Raleigh admits. Quirks a grin that doesn’t feel half as forced as he thinks it should. Probably the pain meds, he thinks—the nurses have something truly _spectacular_ flowing through his IV. “Well, that’s not true. It’s a little like ghost Drifting—Yancy and I, we could always feel each other, no matter where we were on base or how long it’d been since we Drifted. It’s a little like that.”

“Shit, man,” Tendo says emphatically.

Raleigh shrugs as best he can, suddenly uncomfortable. “Brain still thinks it’s there, just can’t feel or move it. It’s weird as hell, actually.”

“I can’t even imagine.”

“Yeah, well…” He coughs, running his good hand through his hair. They’ve gotten him off of most of the machines now, thankfully, and the only ones he’s still hooked up to are the heart and brain monitors and an IV. It’s much easier trying to maneuver in the bed now that he doesn’t have to worry about tugging half a dozen wires out. “Don’t need everyone on the base knowin’ I’m even more fucked up than they already think I am,” he says quietly, and Tendo’s entire body tightens.

“They don’t think you’re fucked up, man. They’re _worried_ about you. Shit, do you even know how long I had to argue with the doctors to get in to see you? Pentecost’s got your room locked down tighter than the Tokyo ‘Dome! We just wanna make sure you’re okay!”

Raleigh says nothing, looks away from his friend’s earnest gaze.

After a long moment, Tendo relents, nodding. “Yeah, alright. I won’t say anything. But I want you to come to me when you need help, y’hear? Anything, day or night. Long as I’m not caught up in a drop, I’ll be there.” He takes a deep breath, leans forward to squeeze Raleigh’s hand as he stands. “Speaking of, I gotta get back to work. But I’ll be back in a couple days, yeah?”

Raleigh nods, feeling tired. He’s been sleeping a lot the past few days, but nothing longer than a couple hours at a time. His dreams, sometimes memories, sometimes nightmares, inevitably wake him up before he can feel truly rested. Hell, considering he’s still having trouble figuring out if the memories he’s replaying are his or Yancy’s, he thinks it’s going to be a long time before he gets a good night’s sleep, if it ever comes.

Tendo waves as he backs out of Raleigh’s hospital room. “Good to see you, my man! You’ll be outta here in no time, and then we’ll go get a drink in Yancy’s name, yeah?”

Raleigh’s body suddenly locks up, steel bands snapping closed on his chest and heart rate skyrocketing. He can’t breathe, can’t think, at the mention of his brother’s name. But Tendo’s gone, out the door before he realizes that something’s wrong, and Raleigh can’t help but be grateful that there’s no one to watch as tears start leaking down his face.

He cries, turning over to let out a muffled scream into his pillow, tears pouring hot and sticky down his face. Raleigh cries for all that he’s lost—his arm, his brother, his Jaeger, his _world_ —and eventually slips back off to sleep, exhausted and emotionally drained.

 

The doctors flutter in and out of Raleigh’s room, taking him for x-rays and MRIs and CAT scans and all sorts of other neurological tests that are supposed to tell them if Raleigh’s brain is stable. They also put him through a whole range of treatments, muscle relaxants and drug cocktails and physical exercises designed to help stimulate his nerves and prevent muscular atrophy. He’s compliant for most of it, drowsing in between the nurses coming to fetch him, feed him or change his IV. There’s just no point in fighting to get out of there, no reason to want to leave—and hell, Raleigh doesn’t even know if there’s going to be somewhere for him to _go_ when the doctors finally release him, because he’s useless now, isn’t he? He can’t fight, can’t pilot a Jaeger, and he can’t really do repair work with only one arm. And he never learned how to do anything else.

Stacker Pentecost comes to see him two days after Tendo’s visit, looking grim and professional and oh-so-reserved in his usual formal military dress. Raleigh’s in the middle of some mindless television program that one of the nurses had turned on for him, but he’s not actually paying all that much attention so he’s glad to mute the volume and turn his focus on the man he wants, more than anything, to blame for his brother’s death.

He can’t, though, because the blame sits squarely on his own shoulders. Raleigh was the one who disobeyed orders, the one who said ‘let’s go kill some kaiju,’ and look where it got him.

He can’t quite look Pentecost in the eyes.

“Ranger Becket,” Pentecost says, voice booming deep and sturdy through Raleigh’s bones. While he’s normally an unyielding force, a pillar of strength for everyone else to draw from in times of crisis, now it just feels like he’s come to give Raleigh all the recriminations he can feel in his soul. “It’s good to see you awake.”

Raleigh swallows, tries to shove himself upright on his pillows and fails miserably because he can only use one arm. “Good to be awake, sir,” he replies respectfully, probably the most respectful he’s ever been with the man. Playing nice for the brass had always been more Yancy’s thing.

“The doctors have been keeping me updated with your progress. They say that your hormone levels are leveling out, and most of your brain scans are normal. You can probably be released from medical by the end of the week,” Pentecost tells him, stepping further into the room and drawing the door closed behind him.

Raleigh nods uncertainly. “And then what, sir?”

There’s a furrow to Pentecost’s brow that he doesn’t like, that speaks of things Raleigh is going to object to on a deep, emotional level. “We want you to do a publicity tour. Show the world that just because one of their beloved Jaegers was destroyed doesn’t mean we can’t still win this war. Show them that we are still capable, still willing, to fight back. If we don’t, public support is going to drop. Already, there are talks about how effective the Jaeger program really is. They want to divert funding to the Wall of Life—”

“The Wall?” Raleigh scowls. “That’s a load of bullshit, sir, and you know it.”

Pentecost sighs heavily. “Yes, well, the UN seems to think it will be a more effective use of resources.”

“All due respect, sir, just because a few Jaegers went down doesn’t mean more of them will. We’ve been holding the kaiju at bay for five years now, and if the public isn’t going to trust that we will continue to protect them then no goddamned publicity tour is going to change their minds,” Raleigh says defensively, crossing his arms over his chest and belatedly remembering that only one of them actually moves.

Pentecost stares at him, eyes dark and unfathomable. When he speaks, it’s with that authoritative rumble that would’ve had Raleigh itching to disobey him just because only weeks earlier. Now, however, he shrinks back into the narrow hospital bed. “Ranger Becket, this isn’t about the public. This is about getting one of my Rangers back on his feet. And since we can’t put you back in a Jaeger,” Pentecost flicks his eyes over Raleigh’s left arm, trussed up in its sling and stubbornly immobile, “then we need to give you something else to do.”

For a second, Raleigh’s stunned, and then he’s so seething mad that he can’t even see straight. “Fuck you, sir,” he hisses, glaring at the blank-faced Marshal in his room. “Just fuck you. This isn’t about me, no matter what you say. You wanna show the world how tough your Rangers are? Find some other way to do it, because no way are you dragging Y-Yancy and Gipsy out there for them to tear apart like wolves! What happened that night is _my_ business, and the world has no right to it!”

“Raleigh,” Pentecost sighs, like Raleigh’s nothing more than an errant child and his feelings don’t even _matter_. “You have a week to get back on your feet once Medical releases you, and then you’re being flown out to New York to start your press circuit.”

He stares for a second, trying to think past the rage splitting his head open, mentally screaming _how dare you come in here and tell me I have to share Yancy with the rest of the world! Haven’t we given enough for you, for them? Isn’t it enough that he_ died _for you? Can’t I just keep what little bit of him I have left to myself? Is that too fucking much to ask?_ Then he remembers how to speak, and says very calmly, his voice perfectly level, “I think I’d like you to leave now, sir.”

“Very well, Ranger Becket.” Pentecost turns sharply on his heel, giving Raleigh one last disappointed look over his shoulder before the door clicks shut and Raleigh is alone again.

He takes one, two shaky breaths, trying to calm his racing heart, and turns the volume on the shitty mindless television show up as high as it’ll go, trying to lose himself in something with no meaning so he won’t break down crying at the thought of sharing what little precious bits of Yancy he has left with a world of strangers.

 

The doctors release him from Medical at the end of the week, just like Pentecost said, and Raleigh relishes the ability to wear real clothes even if he has to have one of the nurses help him tug his deadened arm through the shirt sleeve. Tendo is there to greet him just as they’re bullying him into the wheelchair—Raleigh is stubbornly resisting this, he is not an invalid no matter how bad his injuries are, he can walk out of the ‘Dome’s medical center without looking like he just barely won a fight with a kaiju, thank you very much—and laughs when Raleigh whines for him to explain to the nurses why he doesn’t need it.

Unsurprisingly, nobody listens to him. Tendo wheels Raleigh out of there once he’s finally settled in the chair, though he manages to convince the LOCCENT tech to ditch it two hallways later. He stubbornly walks the rest of the way back to the room he’d shared with Yancy, refusing all help but Tendo’s comforting hand on his good arm, and nearly chokes with grief when the door swings open and it’s untouched, exactly as they’d left it so long ago.

 _Yancy,_ he thinks, and his knees give out. He collapses in the doorway, staring at his brother’s unmade bed, at the array of clothing still scattered across their room—hey, they were two guys, cleanliness wasn’t exactly high on their list of priorities—and the jug of orange juice still sitting on the counter, half drank. It’s spoiled by now, probably halfway to some truly awful cider that he wouldn’t drink if his life depended on it, but the memory still makes him sob.

_Fuck._

_How am I supposed to do this? Live here, in our room, like nothing’s changed?_

“Raleigh?” Tendo asks carefully, kneeling down and wrapping a comforting arm around his shoulders. He’s warm, Raleigh realizes—or maybe it’s just that Raleigh’s so goddamned cold, trembling on the threshold of his old room, his old life.

 _I am not that person anymore,_ he thinks, dazed, his mind aching with emptiness.

Somehow, he manages to pull himself together long enough to climb off of the floor and onto his bed, sprawling out over fresh sheets—someone’s been in to change them, but it’s one of the only things that’ve been touched in the room—with little regard for Tendo’s worried hovering. “M’good,” he mumbles into his pillow. And fuck, it smells like Yancy, like the shampoo they’d shared because it was pointless to buy two different bottles, like his aftershave. Raleigh buries the sob that rises in his throat.

He’s going to wait to break down until he’s alone.

And eventually, Tendo gets the message. Leaves Raleigh’s room, shuts the door softly behind him. “I’ll be around when you need me, man,” he whispers softly, and then he’s gone and Raleigh is alone with the ghost of his brother.

He doesn’t sleep that night, mind too busy replaying all the memories that’d gotten jumbled around in the Drift, tangled and caught up until he can’t tell which ones are his and which ones are Yancy’s, shoved through in the last minutes of his brother’s life. He physically aches with Yancy’s loss, a pain entirely different to the circuit-suit burns or the odd disconnect of his arm, and contemplates for a long moment just ending it all.

He wants his brother, is the thing. Wants Yancy’s warm hugs and unquestioning love, the smiles shared and inside jokes, his warm presence at the back of Raleigh’s mind like a blanket. He wants to be whole again, to be on top of the world and undefeatable, a hero, a god, capable of punching the devil’s monsters in the face and walking away. He wants to turn back the clock, but more than anything Raleigh just wants the pain to end.

 _No you don’t, little brother,_ a faint voice whispers in the back of his mind. _You gotta keep living. Not for me—for you. You’re so young, there’s so much in the world you haven’t seen yet. I’ll always be here, waiting for you, but there’s stuff you gotta do first._

 _Yancy,_ Raleigh sobs into his pillow, screams into the echoing emptiness of his mind.

There’s no response.

 

Raleigh floats through the next three days in something of a blank haze, mindlessly following the doctors’ demands and showing up for all his appointments. It’s almost like he hasn’t left Medical at all, he’s there so often. The nurses say that they just want to make sure he’s okay, that they don’t know what’s going on with his arm but want to make sure he has the best care possible, want to make sure he knows all his options. Dr. Blake wants to know the second Raleigh regains any motor control, wants to be involved in the process if he starts to get his arm back.

They give him muscle exercises to do, physical therapy and more drugs, trying what seems like everything under the sun to fix him. Raleigh doesn’t feel like telling them he doesn’t see the point—he’s broken, there’s no way to fix him. No way to get back what he’s lost.

At least, that’s what he thinks.

On the fourth day he’s back in his quarters, Raleigh wakes up and his fingers give a little twitch. Not much, and nothing voluntary, but it’s more than he’s had since he woke up from the medical coma. It might be a little spiteful, maybe even childish, but Raleigh doesn’t tell anyone. This is his business, and his alone, and he doesn’t need some hotshot doctor writing a revolutionary paper on Raleigh Becket’s Neurological Trauma. If he’s not going to share it with the world, why should he share it with anyone? This is his cross to bear.

Tendo keeps his word, and if Pentecost is saying anything about his injuries then it doesn’t carry to Raleigh. He can’t help but be grateful—the last thing he wants right now is to be stared at, pitied, analyzed. The last thing his fellow pilots need is to worry if they’ll suffer similar injuries the next time they climb in a Jaeger.

He cries himself to sleep every night, wrapped in a pile of Yancy’s old sheets and pillows, and tosses and turns for a few hours until giving up and staring miserably at the photographs that line the walls of their room. He thinks about killing himself twice more, but ultimately decides that he survived for a reason, and he would be remiss to end it before he found out what that was.

He puts on a good front for the rest of the Icebox, Raleigh thinks, stable. Collected. Not about to go fry his brain going into a Drift Simulator solo. And it’s good, that he can pretend for the ‘Dome, for the world. But inside, he’s falling apart, and only getting worse.

He sees flashes of Yancy’s echo everywhere he goes in the ‘Dome—in the mess hall, along random stretches of hallway, in the Jaeger bays and all the other places they’d frequent together. His memory is imprinted in Raleigh’s consciousness, and the slightest glimpse of familiarity is enough to trigger a flashback. By the time his Marshal-given week of recovery is up, Raleigh’s had enough.

 

“I can’t do this,” he says bluntly, striding into Pentecost’s office as he’s bid. “I can’t stay here and see my brother in all the places he’s supposed to be but isn’t.”

Pentecost stares at him for a minute, frowning, before he goes back to filling out the paperwork on his desk. “It’s a good thing you’re leaving tomorrow for New York, then, isn’t it?”

“I’m not going to New York. All due respect, sir, but I’m not gonna go out there and tell the world I’m fine, because I’m not,” Raleigh argues.

There’s an odd twist to Pentecost’s mouth, but for the life of him Raleigh can’t think why. “You’re not fine, and I’m sorry to ask you to pretend to be. But you’re a Ranger, and you have a duty to the PPDC, to your country. You’re already disobeyed a direct order once, Ranger Becket. Don’t do it again.”

Raleigh can’t quite hide his flinch. He stands there in Pentecost’s office for a long moment, gaping, trying to find a response that isn’t screaming his soul’s anguish in the Marshal’s face.

Pentecost nods, still not looking up from his paperwork. “Your chopper leaves at 0900 tomorrow. I suggest packing tonight. Don’t be late.”

“I—” Raleigh wets his lips. Takes a deep breath, strives for Yancy-like levels of cold formality. He doesn’t know how well he succeeds, but something in his tone makes Pentecost straighten in his chair, eyes sharp and narrow. “They told us in the Academy that if your copilot dies, it feels like you’ve lost a limb. Well I’ve lost both, sir, and I can tell you right now that they sure as hell weren’t lying. It’s worse. That being said—my brother’s death, my injuries, are _not_ for public consumption, and if you try to make them so I swear to God I will _disappear_.”

“You have a duty—“ Pentecost snaps, but Raleigh cuts him off.

“I _had_ a duty, sir!” He’s almost growling, panting with rage, and the fingertips of his left hand are suddenly burning. “To Y-Yancy! To Gipsy! But they’re both dead and gone, and nothing you or anyone says is gonna bring them back! So at least give them the honor of a respectful death, don’t make it into one of your publicity events!”

Pentecost rises from his chair slowly, something in the clench of his fists and the slant of his shoulders warning Raleigh to back off.

But he doesn’t, _can’t_ , he’s too far gone already to stop now. “Just leave us alone!” he almost screams, and is mortified to feel tears gathering at the corners of his eyes.

“RANGER BECKET!” Pentecost thunders, but Raleigh’s done.

So done.

He turns and practically flees the room, running down the hallways as fast as he can with his deadened arm in a sling, careening around corners and nearly crashing into several startled techs. They dodge out of the way, though, well used to pilots running to make their deployments, and no one reacts beyond a few “You okay, Raleigh?” echoing behind him.

When Raleigh makes it back to his room, Tendo’s waiting at the door, a worried frown on his face and his throat uncharacteristically bare of a colorful bowtie. Raleigh slows to a walk, stomps past him and tries to shut the door in his face, but Tendo’s smarter than that.

He sticks his boot in the doorframe, refuses to move it until Raleigh lets him in.

“Fine,” Raleigh growls, letting the steel panel swing free and awkwardly shoving all the clothes he can fit into a worn duffel. He doesn’t know who it originally belonged to, but it’s worn and well loved. He gets a couple pairs of worn pants, boxers, and three white wife beaters before he starts piling Yancy’s beloved sweaters in the bag, and those take up the rest of the room he has. They’re lumpy and worn, and too big in the shoulder for Raleigh, but he doesn’t care—they’re a piece of his brother, one of the last pieces he has left, and besides that they’re comfortable as fuck. They’re coming with him.

Tendo watches him pack with gentle eyes. “You’re gonna take care of yourself, right?”

“That’s the plan,” Raleigh grunts, turning and peeling their neat lines of photos from the wall one by one. He’s gentler with these than his temper would usually allow him to be, but Raleigh is taking no chances of them ripping. He pins the stack to his chest with the sling so he can wrap a rubber band around them with his good hand. It works surprisingly better than he thought it would.

Tendo hums, shoving an extra bottle of painkillers in the duffel. “Cause I wouldn’t wanna turn on the news one day and hear that you’d died in a ditch, or something.”

He can’t quite muffle the snort at the image that brings, though it hurts his still-healing burns to laugh. “I’m not gonna die in a ditch, Tendo.”

“Well, good. That’d just be stupid.” Tendo zips the duffel closed, clapping Raleigh on the shoulder before settling it so he can carry it comfortably. All his worldly possessions, everything that matters to him, all in one bag. The thought doesn’t hurt as much as it probably should—the Becket brothers have never been known for being particularly attached to material objects. Instead, it just makes it easier for him to make his grand escape. “I’ll talk to Pentecost, do what I can to mitigate the damage. You just get that head of yours sorted out.”

“I think that might take a while,” Raleigh mutters, grabbing his brother’s bomber jacket emblazoned with Gipsy’s wings. Just like the sweaters, it’s too big across the shoulders, but it’s thick and warm and smells like his brother so Raleigh doesn’t really give a fuck. Maybe he’ll grow into it. Maybe if he keeps enough of his brother’s things around, he won’t be quite so alone.

Tendo nods, accompanying him out of the room and leading him down a series of mostly-vacant hallways. “I know. Not expecting much, man, but stay in touch? A phone call once in a while, an email, just so I know you’re still alive and kicking?”

Raleigh hesitates for a long moment, letting them walk in silence until they get outside the Shatterdome. He shivers in the wind, wishing he’d thought to put on Yancy’s jacket beforehand, and finally nods. “Yeah, alright.” He starts walking away, but then a thought occurs to him and he turns back around. “Hey Tendo?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re a good friend.” Raleigh gives what feels like his first honest smile since he woke up and his world ended, relishing the delighted grin that spreads across Tendo’s face in response. “So good luck with Allison, man, and stay out of trouble.”

“You stay out of trouble,” Tendo snarks back, but he’s relaxed a bit from his protective father persona.

When Raleigh waves and turns to keep walking, all he can feel is an overwhelming relief at being _away. Free,_ he thinks, and pretends he’s not imagining the familiar low throaty chuckle that floats to his ears. He keeps walking until he hits a bus stop, and then rides the line all the way to the end. Gets a room at a shitty motel, using a little of the outrageous amounts of money the PPDC pays its Rangers, and collapses on a mattress that is actually _worse_ than the one he’d had in the Shatterdome to get whatever sleep he can before nightmares and memories inevitably decide to ruin his night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so somehow this thing has grown from the planned four chapters into god knows how many? After this we get into the meat of the movie, though, so it'll move a bit faster *crosses fingers*  
> this is a heavy one, guys. warnings for alcoholism, vague contemplations of suicide, a really unhealthy grieving process, and bucketfuls of aaaaaaangst.

When it’s finally an acceptable time of the day to be up, Raleigh rolls out of bed and falls mindlessly into the exercises that the doctors had instructed him to do. There’s a lot of stretching involved, to make sure that his muscles don’t tighten up or atrophy from disuse, and when he’s finished Raleigh impulsively decides not to put the sling back on. His side tingles pleasantly from the stretch, but there’s no pain from the burns like there has been on previous mornings, and Raleigh?

Raleigh’s done letting a stupid injury win.

So he tugs one of Yancy’s sweaters over his wifebeater, struggling for a moment with the left sleeve, and packs his bags again. Raleigh doesn’t know where he’s going, but he does know he’s getting out of Anchorage, off the map. He’s going to uphold his promise to Stacker Pentecost—he’s going to _disappear._

 

If he makes a couple small adaptations to his normal swagger, Raleigh discovers on his second day of freedom, it’s easy to get his arm to move with the natural rhythm of his body and not look like a dead fish flopping around. If he gets tired of that, tucking his thumb behind his belt buckle also looks mostly normal and has the added benefit of keeping his deadened arm tucked close to his body where it can’t swing into anything by accident. He’s getting better at navigating clothes—the sweater only gives him a few seconds of grief—and repacking the duffel. Raleigh doesn’t dare wear his brother’s Gipsy jacket in public, he’d be too easy to recognize, but he doesn’t want to let it go, either. So it gets stuffed in the bottom of the duffel, and Raleigh brings it out when the nights get especially cold or he needs a physical representation of his brother’s protective presence.

 

He catches a radio broadcast on a bus five days after he leaves the Shatterdome, the words “Honored Jaeger pilot” drawing his attention despite his refusal to have anything to do with that world anymore.

The voice is one he’s unfamiliar with, cool and professional with a hint of disapproval as he tells the world that, “Ranger Raleigh Becket, the surviving pilot of the American Jaeger Gipsy Danger, has been given an honorable discharge from the Pan Pacific Defense Corps today on grounds of medical injuries sustained in his last battle with the Kaiju known as Knifehead. Gipsy Danger’s other copilot, brother Yancy Becket, was killed in the battle, and the Jaeger was deemed unrepairable by PPDC technicians. In a few months, it will be transported to the newly created Oblivion Bay in San Francisco, California, where it will rest forever, serving as a memorial to the pilots lost almost two months ago and the lives they have saved across the world…”

Scowling, Raleigh yanks on the brake line and gets off the bus as fast as he can, in no mood to deal with the publicity inherent in being a Jaeger pilot. He’s left that world behind, there’s left nothing for him back there. Just memories and pain and a hole in his head that hurts as much as his arm doesn’t.

 

Taking his painkillers every eight hours does nothing but fog his head and make the disconnect between his mind and his arm more prominent, so Raleigh stops taking them. The pain makes him feel more real, more awake, anyway. Almost like he deserves it, deserves the pain as punishment for surviving when his brother didn’t.

It becomes his penance, guilt bleeding off of his soul.

Eventually, he wanders into the shittiest corner of Anchorage, sells the remaining pills for the highest price he can haggle, sticks the cash in his duffel and resolves to leave it there until he really needs it. Eventually he’ll have to move on, keep one step ahead of Pentecost and the PPDC, and that’s when he’ll really need untraceable money. For now, he figures draining his accounts is a good enough occupation.

The first time he slouches into the seediest bar he can find with no intention of anything other than getting blindingly drunk, some jackass takes offense to his face. At least, that’s what Raleigh assumes—he’s lost count of the beers and had more than a couple shots of whiskey, and his eyes are starting to cross in midair, so he’s not quite sure—because one second he’s minding his own business and the next there’s a fist flying towards his head.

Raleigh ducks with reflexes honed from years of Kwoon sparring and fighting in a giant robot, even drunk as he is, and plants his good shoulder in the stranger’s gut. There’s a _whoosh_ of someone losing their breath, a distant cry of rage, and then an elbow slams down on his bad shoulder. Raleigh collapses to the floor with a muted cry, gagging and desperately trying to get back on his feet as steel-capped boots kick at him, but there are three of them now and he’s not exactly coordinated.

He loses that fight, only able to get up from the ground when the bartender breaks it up and summarily kicks all the other men out of the bar for the night, and staggers back to his motel room with an aching head, split lip, and black eye. Bruises line most of his torso, and he’s sure there are more on his bad arm but for once he’s glad he can’t feel them.

He’s never felt more alive.

 

He hops a train to Valdez some unknowable days later—economy class, don’t let them see an ID, don’t let them recognize you—and finds another shitty bar, another seedy motel. Paces his room all night in between bouts of restless sleep, praying to his brother’s ghost that he’ll be allowed just a few hours of peace. Gets rip roaring drunk most nights, just to drown out the echoing emptiness in his head, the memories that tumble over into reality without any warning. Gets in as many fights as he can handle. Slowly, so slowly it almost feels like he’s not making any progress at all, Raleigh starts winning. Figures out how to keep his deadened arm from being a liability, how to use it to his advantage, how to take his opponents by surprise.

It’s nothing like how he used to fight, all dirty tricks and slick footwork, but Raleigh doesn’t care. That part of his life is over, and he has no intentions of going back. There’s no one who cares enough to criticize him, to drag him back from the edge—the only one who has any right to do that is dead, anyways, and Raleigh doubts he would listen to anyone else who tried.

He gains a reputation, gets banned from most of the bars in Valdez. Starts getting in fights on the streets. Deliberately seeks out the most dangerous people he can find, gang bangers and drug dealers and murderers, anyone who’ll fight him long enough to distract him from the pain in his soul.

Eventually, Raleigh leaves Valdez, follows the Alaskan coastline down until he hits Juneau, and starts the whole process over again.

 

He still cries himself to sleep, whenever sleep is kind enough to take him, still sees flashes of Yancy out of the corner of his eye, still hears his voice in his head at the most inopportune moments. Not that there’s ever really a _good_ moment to hear his dead brother’s voice, but it’s always when he’s considering getting in a fight with a mob boss or where to find the next shitty motel with a reasonably low chance of getting robbed when he’s not there.

All his worldly possessions can still fit into that ragged duffel, which is good for travel purposes but comes across as kind of sad and lonely, Raleigh thinks on one of his more introspective days. They’re rare and few between, mostly because he can’t help but imagine what he’d be doing right now if he hadn’t fucked up so bad, if Yancy was still alive, if they still had Gipsy. They’re depressing thoughts, so Raleigh tends to save them for those really bad days where he doesn’t even want to get out of bed (even if he’s doing everything _but_ sleeping, sometimes he’s so low that it doesn’t matter).

But those days are gradually being outweighed by the good ones, where he can wander the streets and think with fondness of his brother’s sarcastic commentary, of their days as something so much closer than brothers, two halves of a whole. Yancy lives on in his memories, slowly being sorted out a day at a time until his head isn’t quite as much of a mess.

His numbed fingers twitch more often now. Raleigh’s only been able to do it voluntarily a couple of times, but the fact that he can move them at all is enough reason to hope. One day, maybe, eventually, he’ll have his arm back.

To celebrate, he gets in a record five fights in one night and goes home completely shitfaced, grinning like an idiot.

 

He doesn’t keep track of the days, just knows when it’s time to move on when absolutely no one will sell him alcohol. In fact, he doesn’t even know what month it is until he’s sitting in a nicer bar than his usual, sipping on his third beer of the night and debating punching the bodybuilder asshole sitting two stools down, and the bartender gets a phone call then goes sheet white. She reaches for the TV remotes, flipping them all over to a news channel that Raleigh hasn’t actually watched in ages, and turning the volume up as far as it’ll go.

There’s a kaiju off the coast of some unknown country, category III, two vaguely familiar Jaegers fighting valiantly to stop it before it reaches land.

_Huh,_ Raleigh thinks. _They must’ve learned from Knifehead._

Then a flickering number at the bottom of the screen captures his attention, infinitely more interesting than watching a fight he might’ve been part of had his world not already ended. _November 10, 2020_ , it reads, _Kaiju Attack off Coast of Seoul. Codename Atticon, Cherno Alpha and Nova Hyperion Deployed._

Fuck, but he hadn’t realized that it’s been almost seven months since he walked out of the Icebox, seven months since he left his world behind. And he’d made a promise. Raleigh doesn’t particularly feel like talking to anyone, especially not someone who’d known him from the good days, not even Tendo—Tendo, with his gentle eyes and his unquestioning understanding, who would take one look at Raleigh and just shake his head, quietly nudge him in the right direction until he’s no longer such a hot mess.

But all the Shatterdomes go on high alert every time there’s a kaiju attack. It doesn’t matter which country is under attack, they’re all ready and waiting to provide support should it be needed, everyone focused on stopping the latest threat. Tendo probably won’t even have his personal phone on him, and if he does then he certainly won’t be answering. It’s the perfect opportunity.

_Fuck it,_ Raleigh thinks, and drains the rest of his beer before asking the bartender if he can borrow her phone. She looks understanding, sympathetic but not pitying—they’ve all lost people—and passes over a slim cell phone without hesitation.

Tendo’s number is one thing he’s never forgotten, not even with how messed up his head has been for the past seven months, and he punches the digits easily into the touch screen. His thumb hovers over the green ‘dial’ button for a few seconds, but Raleigh’s come this far. He’s not going back now. He may still be running, but leaving a message isn’t a commitment, and it isn’t a promise.

Raleigh takes a deep breath and pushes the button.

Waits for the call to connect and then to go to voicemail. Laughs at Tendo’s cheerful ‘ _Hey, I’m too busy to deal with your shit right now, so leave a message and I’ll get around to it later!’_

“Hey, Tendo. It’s Raleigh. I—” His voice cracks, and Raleigh breaks off for a minute to collect his thoughts. He really shouldn’t be doing this drunk, but he doesn’t have a phone of his own and it’s too late to go back now. “I know I promised to keep in touch, but I just—I’m not in a good place right now, man, and it’s been rough. Just wanted to let you know I’m still kicking. Saw what Pentecost did, suppose I owe you one for that, right? You—you’re a good friend, Tendo, better than I deserve. Stay strong, man, and keep fighting the good fight. They can’t do it without you.”

He hangs up before he loses his nerve, or says something truly embarrassing, but it feels like a huge weight’s been lifted from his chest that he didn’t even know was there. The bartender takes her phone back, giving him a small smile and another beer, and Raleigh thinks about staying to watch the end of the broadcast.

Then Nova Hyperion goes down on the screen with a scream of twisted metal.

He leaves the beer untouched on the counter and heads back out into the night, feeling suddenly sick to his stomach.

 

One day, in late December—he can only tell because of the ever-growing number of Christmas displays in shop windows, because there is snow on the ground practically all the time in Alaska and he’s never trusted the weather anyways, but this means his birthday has just passed and _fuck_ Raleigh decides he hates birthdays now—Raleigh wakes up from a couple hours of surprisingly deep sleep and tries to flex his deadened hand out of habit.

Then has to look down, because he swears he just felt something _move._

And sure enough, when Raleigh checks, his hand has curled into a very loose fist. He takes a deep breath, tries to relax again, and is ecstatic when his hand actually does it.

Overjoyed, he jumps out of bed and dances around the room, turns to share the good news. “Yancy, I—”

_Oh._

Raleigh slumps back onto the end of his shitty mattress in a shitty motel in a shitty nowhere town, feeling tears well up at the back of his eyes. The chasm at the back of his mind throbs with pain, muted from what it had been immediately after the accident but still persistent, and he screams his grief into the pillows when it’s all just too much to hold inside.

He doesn’t go out that night, or the next. Or the next. When he does finally leave the motel room, it’s Christmas.

 

He tries to pull himself together after that. Gets into fewer fights, slows down on trying to drink the entire state’s alcohol supply, starts looking for something else to do with his life. His money isn’t lasting, after all, not at the rate he’s blowing through it, and it seems incredibly wasteful to be doing nothing with the second chance he’s been given when there are people out there, good people, fighting the kaiju and dying to save a world that won’t remember them once they’re gone.

There are signs up all over the city, all shouting that the Wall of Life is looking for workers. It’s a lot of risk, working that high up and that close to the water, but they’re offering good rations and that’s something Raleigh desperately needs. As the war drags on and people get more and more scared about how long it’s going to last, no one cares how much money you throw around for food. At least, not in the places Raleigh goes to. Rationing is for everyone, and he can’t get around it even if he advertises who he used to be. (He’s refuses to do this, because that would defeat the point of hiding, and also because he doesn’t want to remember the stupid, stupid _kid_ he used to be. Raleigh’s not that guy anymore. He’s grown up, moved on.)

But the Wall…Raleigh balks at the idea. He and Yancy used to lie awake at night, after a long day of training, and laugh at the idiots who thought building a wall to keep the kaiju out was a good idea. The fact that the UN was considering cutting PPDC funding to keep building the Wall after Knifehead was just the cherry on top—he doesn’t want to go support the effort that’s taking the Jaegers away from their pilots. It feels too much like being a traitor.

 

On March first, Raleigh wakes up with a crippling headache, persistent aches all over his body, and what feels like half the Pacific Ocean in his lungs. He nearly falls out of bed coughing, heaving for breath, but there’s nothing coming up.

It takes him a long minute to realize that he’s replaying Yancy’s last moments, the crushing panic and struggle to breathe as he sinks to the depths with every bone in his body aching from the force that Knifehead had ripped him out of the Conn-Pod with.

At the thought, Raleigh lunges again for the trashcan. This time, he pukes up everything in his stomach from the night before. When he finally finishes, he’s trembling in sweat-drenched clothes and wishing desperately his brother is there to whisper soothing platitudes into his hair, hug him until he feels better.

But there’s no one there, because Raleigh’s an idiot and a selfish bastard, and he’s the reason his brother died in the first place.

So he lies on the filthy carpet, smelling of vomit and sweat and tears, achingly alone. It takes Raleigh a good long moment to realize that he can’t feel his left arm at all. It’s completely numb—whatever feeling he’d been regaining over the past couple months is gone.

Raleigh lets the tears flow, then—great body-wracking sobs that catch in his chest and feel like they’re cracking him open as they escape, tears puddling into the carpet below his body and making giant tracks down his face, mumbling apologies under his breath when he has the air to speak them. He cries until he’s completely exhausted, empty and hollow inside, and falls asleep right there on the uncomfortable carpet.

When he wakes up, it’s light outside. March second, the clock tells him, a completely new day. It’s the first time he’s managed more than three hours of sleep at any one time since he woke up, the first time he’s woken peacefully or without the lingering grasp of the nightmares that plague his mind. Raleigh sits up, takes a shower, pulls on Yancy’s Gipsy jacket.

He wanders down to the recruiting stations for the Wall, all his worldly possessions in a duffel slung over his bad shoulder and numb hand tucked into his belt for stability. The air in his lungs is fresh. It feels like a new day, a new start, a new opportunity.

It feels like redemption.

 

Unfortunately, the foreman at the Wall laughs in his face once he realizes Raleigh’s only got one working arm. “What’chu wanna work here for? You’ll just get yourself killed!” he says, shoving past Raleigh and turning his attention to the next man in line.

Raleigh takes two steps to the left, blocks the foreman’s progress with a numb elbow to the stomach. “I can do the work,” he says, voice low and rasping. It’s the voice he uses to threaten the guys he can’t fight off, and it does the job just as well now.

The foreman swallows heavily, giving Raleigh a second once-over. “Even if you could, what conscience I have wouldn’t let me send you up there,” he explains quietly. “I send men up there every day, and I know that a lot of ‘em aren’t comin’ back down. I have to live with that. I don’t have to live with sending a cripple to his certain death.”

Raleigh growls, deep in his throat. He survived Knifehead, survived the loss of his brother, his entire world crumbling into nothingness in one fell swoop. He can survive a little hands-on work on a wall. “Then give me something else to do. Inventory, making sure the workers have their supplies. I’m good with my hand, and I’ll work hard.”

“Don’t doubt it, son,” the foreman says, but now he looks thoughtful. “Look, how are your cooking skills? Camp cook died two weeks ago in a freak accident—some idiot dropped a hammer from the top of the Wall—and we’ve been making do with whatever we can scrape together ever since then. You make decent meals, you can have a job as far as the Wall will take you. Plus extra rations.”

It’s more than Raleigh had hoped for, and at the same time so much less. He wants to work with his hands, hard manual labor and long hours so he’ll be exhausted when it finally comes time to try to sleep. Aching muscles and that bone deep weariness that feels so good because it means he’s alive, he’s still here, he’s beat the odds and laughed in the face of death and _I’m still kicking, you fucking kaiju bastards, you haven’t taken me yet._

But he needs rations, and something to do with his life besides drinking and brawling in an endless string of bars. This is that something.

So he smiles, looks the man in the eyes and feels giddy when there’s no knowing realization there. The foreman has no idea who he is. He’s a complete stranger, just some other man down on his luck and looking for whatever good fortune he can find. “I’ll take it,” he says, and shakes hands with the foreman to seal the deal.

Raleigh gets pointed towards a dingy tent, larger than all the others, in the center of the work camp. When he strides inside, three well-muscled young men, all probably only a few years older than Raleigh himself, look up at him with suspicion lining their faces.

“I’m the new cook,” he says slowly, letting his duffel bag slide free from his shoulder in case he has to fight his way out of this one.

There’s no need for it, though, because as soon as his words register all three men break out into large, beaming smiles. “Thank god!” the nearest one says, striding over to clap Raleigh on the shoulder. He staggers under the pressure. “If we had to make do with one more meal like the past two weeks, I think the entire camp would’ve rioted!”

Raleigh gives them all a small smile, finding as he does that it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it would’ve a year ago, and looks over the set up. He’d always been the one to do the cooking for the family after their mom had died, because their dad ditched not long after and Yancy burned almost everything he made. It had fallen to Raleigh, partially because he had the skill and partially because he’d been eager to have a way to support them that was been _his_ and no one else’s _._ His skills might be a little rusty, after so many years of eating military provided food and then the year of scavenging, but cooking is one of those things that Raleigh doesn’t think he will ever forget.

That being said, he starts off simple. The supplies delivered to the Wall camps aren’t anything fancy, just basic rations intended to give the men nutrition and get them back to work. But Raleigh finds a couple bottles of various spices stashed away in a box at the back of the tent, and is struck with inspiration. “Spices can make anything delicious,” he explains off-handedly to the men he’s taking over from, and they watch with curious eyes as he stirs rosemary and thyme into the industrial-sized pot of soup that’s simmering over a large burner.

_It’s just like explaining things to Yance_ , Raleigh thinks, and is pleasantly surprised when the thought doesn’t hurt half as much as it used to.

By the time the dinner alarms sound, loud and overbearing in the ground camp but probably just barely reaching the top of the Wall, he’s got enough soup and some gruel better left off unidentified made up to feed everyone. Luckily, Raleigh isn’t expected to be in charge of dispensing the food, just cooking it, so he doesn’t have to argue with anyone over portion sizes.

The men fall on their rations like starving dogs, and the flurry of delighted groans that ensues would be comical if Raleigh wasn’t feeling so damn proud of himself.

‘Yeah, you can stay, kid,” the camp foreman mutters, bumping shoulders with Raleigh on his way back to his own tent. “Find an empty tent and get settled in for the night. The night crews are the only ones running around once the sun goes down.”

Raleigh resists from replying that the sun had gone down an hour ago, and instead just collects his duffel from the corner and wanders down the rows to find an unoccupied tent.

 

He gets in plenty of fights those first couple of weeks, stubborn jackasses who think that just because Raleigh’s only got one working arm he has no business being around the camp. Most of them back off once they realize he’s the new cook, too panicked at the thought of losing the first quality food they’ve had in weeks to actually hit him, but a few especially stupid guys still go for it.

These, Raleigh learns, are usually the guys who work the top of the Wall. Very strong, very brave, usually dead within a few weeks. Nobody lasts long on top of the Wall, there are accidents all the time, but this surprisingly does nothing to decrease the demand for positions.

It isn’t until he hears one of the foreman’s calls for volunteers that he understands.

“It’s a high turnover rate, very dangerous, so we can afford to offer extra rations to anyone who goes up there. It’s a good incentive,” the foreman explains afterwards. “People are desperate to get enough food.”

Raleigh can appreciate the feeling, because even though he and his three makeshift assistants get extra rations themselves he’s still starving. Doesn’t drink nearly as much—any alcohol in the camp is hoarded and viciously protected, so he goes through a bit of withdrawal until he gets drawn into the biweekly poker tournament and wins a couple shots of some ridiculously strong moonshine. Whatever muscle he had had in his PPDC days has been stripped away, along with any extra fat, leaving him lean and slim. Yancy’s sweaters are larger than ever on his frame, but Raleigh refuses to get rid of them for anything.

He still gets flashbacks, can be walking through the camp and suddenly be two years in the past, in Gipsy, watching his world end and knowing there’s nothing he can do to stop it, but they’re rarer now. Less incapacitating. His grief isn’t so suffocating anymore, he can breathe through his loss and get up at the end of it, go back to work, act like everything’s normal. He doesn’t feel the need to hide out in his tent for days afterwards, screaming into the pillows because his soul has been torn in two.

Any fights he gets in now are quickly broken up by the foreman and shift managers, who don’t tolerate anything that might interrupt the rate of construction. But they usually don’t get there until after Raleigh’s proven he can hold his own, deadened arm or not, and by now most of the camp knows not to mess with him. This doesn’t mean much, when the turnover rate is so high and there are new faces every day, but Raleigh resolutely keeps fighting back against the assholes. Respect builds up like the Wall, gradual and unyielding, and his place in camp as the cook is rarely questioned after a few months.

His days are busy, filled with making sure he’s cooking enough rations to feed everyone. The only time Raleigh really has to himself is at night, and that’s when the memories of Yancy come back to haunt him. He’s still not sleeping more than four hours a night, rising earlier than anyone else because he just can’t deal with tossing and turning pointlessly any longer.

Raleigh discovers that he loves watching sunrises. Loves seeing the world turn glittering and golden-hued, loves watching the start of another day, another chance, another opportunity to make something of himself. Yancy’s ghost whispers that he’s proud of Raleigh, and it warms some secret part of his heart that had been aching with loss and loneliness.

He leaves messages on Tendo’s phone whenever he remembers, which is probably not nearly as often as the man would like, switching phones every time so Tendo can’t call him back and force him to talk. He doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want anyone from the old days to see how low he’s sunk. It’s just…he made a promise, and Tendo had been so good to him in the days following Yancy’s death. The least he can do is leave a couple messages. (They’re still not a commitment. Raleigh refuses to feel bad.)

His arm regains motion gradually, like a child first learning how to walk. Raleigh does his best to avoid advertising it, like it wasn’t paralyzed in a horrific accident, like his motor control issues are just something that _is._

It works, for the most part.

Probably because Raleigh’s so determinedly blasé about it. He refuses to make a big deal out of his arm, refuses to use it to gain sympathy with the camp workers, refuses to accept it as a limitation, and so gradually the rest of the camp comes around to the same perspective.

Raleigh refuses to be held back by a little brain damage. He’s walked among gods, okay, and punched giant sea monsters in the face. A little thing like paralysis isn’t going to stop him from getting what he wants, and what he wants right now is to live a normal life. For the most part, he gets his wish.

 

He tries not to pay too much attention to the news, but it’s impossible to ignore as the years pass that more and more Jaegers are falling to the kaiju. A small part of Raleigh whispers that he should go back, he can do something, he knows how to fight these monsters, but it’s buried deep in his heart where he can easily ignore it.

They turned their backs on him first, after all. Asking him to do a publicity tour when he was fresh out of the hospital, struggling to accept his brother’s death, just barely clinging to life. What did they expect to happen, he wonders sometimes in the darkness of his tent, when sleep refuses to come easily.

The answer, of course, is that they had no idea, because something like Knifehead had never happened before.

But no. Raleigh’s done—he’s served his time, did his duty, lost his brother to the cause. He’s given enough. Whatever life he has left is his own, to spend how he sees fit.

_Uh huh. And that’s why you’re still at the Wall,_ a nasty voice whispers in his mind, sounding nothing like Yancy’s warm reassuring tones. _Still fighting the good fight, just on your own terms instead of theirs._

Raleigh turns that thought over for a good week and a half before he decides it’s true.

 

But life on the Wall, cooking for a couple hundred strangers, using every moment he can to sneak away to Sitka for seasonings and a beer or two, could never sustain him indefinitely. Raleigh knows this, just like he knows his name, just like he knows how to breathe. And by the time the news stations announce the decommissioning of Striker Eureka, the only Mark V Jaeger to be built, the most famous of all the Jaegers, he’s feeling that itch to do something else. Find another opportunity, another chance to stick it to those kaiju bastards that he’s still alive.

He just wasn’t expecting it to come in a military grade helicopter with the PPDC’s logo on the side.

_Fuck,_ he thinks, drifting away from the warehouse and the battle footage playing out on the TV to watch a familiar dark skinned man climb from the chopper.

Marshal Stacker Pentecost looks around the camp, a flat expression on his face, before his eyes land on Raleigh and something unexpectedly like relief fills them. “Mr. Becket!”

Raleigh’s just a little bit confused at having this emotion directed at _him,_ of all people, especially considering their last meeting, but he keeps it hidden. “Marshal,” he greets neutrally, tucking his thumb into his belt loop as has become his habit. “You’re looking sharp.”

“Been a long time,” Pentecost says.

He knows. Knows exactly how long it’s been since he ran away from this man, away from his responsibilities. He thinks it might be time to stop running. “Five years, four months.”

“Can I have a word?” The words are polite enough, but Raleigh knows military structure well enough to know the Marshal isn’t really asking.

So he shrugs, leading the way back into the warehouse. Sees the warning looks the foreman is giving Pentecost, and claps him on the shoulder in mute thanks before walking away to find them some privacy in one of the far corners. “Step into my office, I guess.” He waves his good arm, trying to pretend that he doesn’t know why Marshal Stacker Pentecost, of all the fucking people, is here.

“It took me a long time to find you. Anchorage, Sheldon Point, Sitka.”

Raleigh has to smile at that. “Wasn’t exactly trying to make it easy on you, sir.” Settling against something that might’ve been intended to be stairs at one point or another, he tries to find a position that alleviates the pain his deadened arm has been feeling all day. “What do you want?”

“I’ve spent the past six months activating everything I can get my hands on,” Pentecost says gravely. “There’s an old Jaeger, Mark III. You might know her. She needs a pilot.”

He snorts, gesturing at his left arm with his right. “You know I can’t ever pilot again, sir.”

“We’ll work around it. Doctors have got some new treatments, based off of studies done on pilots who’ve suffered injuries similar to yours. They think they can get you back up to full mobility in a week.” Pentecost starts pacing a little, up and down in a tight little row. It’s a sign of agitation, one he hadn’t expected to see from the usually-collected Marshal.

“Still, I can’t have been your first choice. Why you goin’ to all the effort?”

“You are my first choice. All the other Mark III pilots are dead,” Pentecost tells him, and Raleigh can’t hold back his wince. Yeah, that’d be a good reason to reactivate a dishonored Ranger who won’t pass even half of the physical tests required for piloting.

Still, though. There’s a difference between being ready to go back to the PPDC and being ready to strap back into a Jaeger. “Look,” he sighs. “I can’t have anyone else in my head again. You knew it five years ago, what makes you think my answer will be different now?”

“Because I’m asking you a different question,” Pentecost says, and his voice is almost gentle.

But Raleigh shakes his head anyways. “I was still connected to my brother when he died. I can’t go through that again. My copilot’s dead, sir. My Jaeger’s dead. I’m done.”

“We’ll find you a new copilot. Got an old simulator that still works, we can put you in there with all the candidates until we find one that’s compatible. I won’t ask you to spar.”

It’s tempting, the idea of climbing back in the Conn-Pod. Being that powerful again, being back on top of the world. But Raleigh can’t, in good conscience, let anyone back in his head—let alone multiple people. Who knows what the wound Yancy’s death had left in the back of his mind would do to them? And then they’d be out a bunch of good pilots, just because Raleigh’s mind is fucked. “I can still fight, sir,” he replies angrily, staring out at what small piece of the wall he can see from this angle. “I’m not a cripple. But even if I was, I wouldn’t let anyone back in my head. If you’re smart, you won’t make me Drift again.”

“Haven’t you heard, Mr. Becket?” Pentecost booms, voice echoing in the wide expanses of the warehouse and in what’s left of Raleigh’s burned and blackened soul. “The world is coming to an end. So where would you rather die? _Here_ , or in a Jaeger?”

And fuck everything, but he’s right.

Raleigh feels his shoulders slump with acquiescence. “I suppose we’re leaving now, then?”

“Soon as you’re packed.”

“I’m packed.” He can’t believe he’s doing this. It’s a shitty idea—the shittiest, probably—but it just might work. If nothing else, Raleigh can say that he died trying. “Just gotta get my bag.”

Pentecost follows Raleigh impatiently all the way to his beat-up little tent, as if afraid Raleigh will make a run for it the second he’s out of the Marshal’s sight. _As if,_ he thinks scornfully, and throws on one of Yancy’s lumpy sweaters with the ease of practice before zipping his duffel closed and exiting the tent.

“You taking off?” the camp foreman asks as they pass, eyeing Raleigh’s bag and the Marshal scornfully.

Raleigh laughs. For all his prickliness, the foreman has been good to him. Gave him a job, a second chance, kept him from going up to commit a passive form of suicide. They weren’t ever friends, really, but people don’t come to the Wall to make friends. Raleigh probably won’t ever be able to express what that means to him, but he thinks the other man knows. “When real life comes knockin’, you don’t ignore it,” he says cheerfully, shaking the foreman’s hand. “Guess you gotta find a new cook, though.”

“Eh, we’ll manage. Good luck,” the foreman says earnestly. The entire camp watches Raleigh climb into the chopper after Pentecost, the blades speeding up with a whirr and lifting them into the air. The cheer that follows after them warms some distant, long-buried part of his soul. Raleigh smiles into the sky, thinking _I did it, Yance. I kept on living, I made a difference._

And Yancy’s voice whispers back, _Good for you, little brother._


	3. Chapter 3

Raleigh shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the chopper’s got enough fuel to fly them all the way across the Pacific Ocean to Hong Kong without stopping, but he is. “Didn’t realize we were in such a hurry,” he says mildly, and Pentecost snorts at him across the belly of the copter.

“Nobody’s got a lot of time anymore. Took six damn months to find you, and a lot of people who’re left think it was a wasted effort.” Dark eyes flick over Raleigh again, studying him with calm intensity. “How’s the arm?”

He shrugs. “Got good days and bad days, sir. Today’s a bad day.”

Pentecost apparently doesn’t have a good answer to that, because he doesn’t respond and silence curls around them. Raleigh studiously stares out the window, watching the waves crash against each other far below them. Yancy would say something poetic and dopey about it, he knows, because deep down under the rugged All-American exterior Yancy was just a giant sap. But Yancy’s not here, and Raleigh’s never quite seen the world through the same eyes no matter how many years they spent in each other’s heads.

But just thinking of what his brother would say doesn’t hurt so bad, just a persistent low throb right under his collarbone instead of the dagger to the heart it had been directly After, and Raleigh takes a deep breath, pushes through it, pretends he can’t still feel Pentecost’s eyes on him.

It’s a relief when Hong Kong comes into view, low on the horizon and barely in Raleigh’s line of sight.

 

The aerial view of the Hong Kong Shatterdome is stunning, even though the weather’s taken a decidedly unpleasant turn. Rain doesn’t bother Raleigh, not after so many years at the Wall—construction doesn’t stop for anyone or anything—but he may have hoped for somewhat better conditions on his return to the PPDC.

Their pilot lands easily despite the wind and water beating against the outer plating, and Raleigh slings the strap of his single bag over his bad shoulder as they wait for the blades to stop spinning. When he looks out the window, there’s a figure outlined in black waiting on the tarmac for them. Raleigh follows Pentecost off the helicopter and over, murmuring a thank you to the pilot as he goes. She smiles, waves cheerfully, and flips a lot of switches on the controls in front of her, going through post-flight checks.

He carefully tucks his left thumb into his belt and adopts the swagger that makes his arm look the most natural, suddenly not wanting to advertise his disability. If people are counting on him to climb back in a Jaeger and save the world, he doesn’t want to shake their faith in him—in _Pentecost—_ prematurely. Pentecost greets the person formally, and then the black umbrella lifts to reveal a young Japanese woman of compact stature, and Raleigh’s brain grinds to a stuttering halt.

There’s a sensation, a slight tingling floating around the back of his mind, like in the early days when he and Yancy hadn’t Drifted quite so often and the Ghost Drift was just starting to form between them. It’s an abrupt change from the five years of cold silence Raleigh’s gotten used to, and it takes him a moment to remember how to react like he isn’t feeling the light caress of the woman’s emotions, _surprise guilt frustration expectance hope_ , like a hurricane in his head. He almost flinches away from her, from the harsh reality she represents, until he realizes it’s a one way connection. She can’t feel him.

She bows her head slightly as Pentecost introduces them, handing Raleigh his own black umbrella. “Miss Mori, this is Ranger Raleigh Becket. Ranger Becket, this is Mako Mori, one of our brightest. She was the one in charge of restoring the Mark III Jaeger I mentioned, and personally handpicked your potential copilots.”

Mori shoots Pentecost an inscrutable look at that, then mutters something under her breath. Raleigh’s Japanese has never been all that great, and has only suffered for the five years of self-imposed isolation, but he catches something about “not what I expected” and has to laugh.

“Better or worse?” he quips back in barely passable Japanese, and smiles gently at the blush that suddenly blooms across her face.

“I am sorry, I did not mean to offend,” Mori says quietly. “I have heard a lot about you, Mr. Becket.”

Raleigh, for all that he’s been hiding under a rock for the past five years, has not completely lost his social abilities. He bows his head, a poor imitation of her move earlier, and is grateful when that seems to do the trick. Mori bows back, and Pentecost scowls at the both of them like he knows something they don’t before leading the way into the Shatterdome proper.

“You will tour the facilities, then Miss Mori will show you to your Jaeger,” Pentecost says shortly, pressing a couple buttons on the wall of the room that Raleigh belatedly realizes is actually an elevator.

“ _Hey! Wait for us!”_

_“Hold the elevator!”_

Two voices ring out in tandem, and Raleigh instinctually presses closer to Mori so that the two men who rush out of the rain will have room to board. The door swishes shut behind them, and he gets a faceful of water when the man standing closest to him, short and seeming entirely too big a personality for his body, flails like a dog.

“Careful, careful! Kaiju specimens are delicate and exceedingly rare, so look but don’t touch, please!”

Pentecost rolls his eyes. “Mr. Becket, this is our research team. Dr. Gottlieb, and Dr. Geiszler.”

“Ah, nice to meet you. Call me Newt, only my mother calls me Doctor,” the tiny man says, and Raleigh has to awkwardly turn down shaking his  hand because he offers his left instead of his right—and who the hell _does_ that, anyways, doesn’t everyone shake with their right? “Hermann! These are human beings, why don’t you come say hello?”

The other man looks moderately more normal—though he’s wearing a cardigan and leaning rather heavily on a cane, and Raleigh feels a sudden flash of understanding sympathy—and scowls at ‘Newt.’ “I have asked you before not to call me by my first name, Newton, I am a doctor. You have known me for over ten years, don’t you dare even speak to me like that, and—”

“ _Oh yes, ten years, and in that entire time_ —” Newt grumbles, in an alarmingly good mimicry of ‘Hermann’s’ snarky tone.

Raleigh eyes the sprawling ink that’s revealed on Newt’s arms as the tiny doctor rolls up his sleeves, but decides he’s better off not asking when he recognizes the distinctive facial plates of Yamarashi—it’s hard to forget a monster you had a hand in taking down. Unfortunately, both scientists see him looking.

Newt beams. “You like? Had to beg my American artist to fly out here and do ‘em for me, nobody around here wanted to do the ink.”

“Forgive him, he’s a kaiju ‘groupie.’ I keep telling him that it’s going to get him in trouble one day, but he loves them,” Hermann tells Raleigh in something masquerading as an undertone.

“Excuse you, Hermann, I don’t love them. I study them. The evolutionary design needed to sustain life at those pressures and then survive at the surface is fascinating, and I think they’re worth a closer examination,” Newt snaps. “I’m also one of the few people in the world that actually wants to see one alive and up close one day.”

Raleigh bites back a laugh, trying to picture the tiny doctor next to Yamarashi or even Clawhook and failing miserably. The elevator ‘dings’ open and Pentecost stalks out with Mori on his heels. Raleigh can’t resist throwing one parting shot at the scientists before he leaves. “Trust me. You really, really don’t.”

The stunned silence that follows him out into once-familiar looking corridors is strangely gratifying.

“So that’s your research division? Man, things’ve changed,” he comments, and watches Mori’s shoulders twitch with silent laughter, feels the tinkle of her amusement against his mind like a gentle rain. Good, he thinks. At least one of them is entertained.

Pentecost comes to a halt in front of a large steel-bound door with a keypad in the center of it, scowling at him as Mori inputs a code. “We aren’t an army anymore, Mr. Becket. We’re the resistance. Welcome to the Shatterdome.”

The door swings open slowly, groans of protest rising from strained hinges, and Raleigh’s breath abruptly leaves his chest in a whoosh. He didn’t know how much he’s missed it, the Jaegers and the techs and the general atmosphere of _purpose_ to a Shatterdome. But he has—and this time he can stand to walk through a Jaeger hangar without his brother’s shadow hanging over him.

They stride into the main hangar and it’s immediately clear that Pentecost is all business—he’s moving at a brisk pace, just trying to show Raleigh the basics before he goes back to whatever else he does on a daily basis, while Raleigh would like a moment to look around, take everything in, adjust to being back in the flow of a war effort.

Pentecost waves a hand behind them, and when Raleigh looks there’s a giant screen above the door reading 000:14:35:45 and counting down. “The War Clock. We reset it after every battle. Dr. Gottlieb’s worked up a formula to predict when the kaiju will come through the Breach, so we’re a little more prepared than we used to be. The frequency of attacks is accelerating.”

“How long until the next reset?” Raleigh has to ask, but his attention is firmly fixed on the three absolutely gorgeous Jaegers standing in the hangar like silent sentinels.

“A week, if we’re lucky.”

“Fantastic,” Raleigh grumbles. That’s not very long at all, probably not even long enough to find a new copilot and get properly settled into the Drift with them. He refuses to Drift with anyone he doesn’t absolutely trust, and he absolutely rejects the idea of going into battle untested, not least because the probability of his flashbacks will increase dramatically when battling Kaiju.

Pentecost scowls but waves an arm to keep them moving, sidestepping several techs driving lifts and looking harried. “This complex used to house thirty Jaegers in five bays just like this one. Now, all we’ve got left is four.”

“ _Four_?” Fuck. He’d watched the news broadcasts, same as everyone else at the Wall, but that didn’t mean he was exactly paying attention to them. “I had no idea it was this bad,” Raleigh says, and though only Mori gives a sign of hearing—external or otherwise—he still gets the sense that his vague apology is heard and accepted. Not that he needs to give an apology, because Pentecost had asked things from him that Raleigh wasn’t able to give five years ago, and he’d needed the time away. Needed to grieve for his brother, needed to pay his penance for surviving when Yancy had not.

Pentecost grunts. “Crimson Typhoon, China.” He lists the Jaeger’s stats and Raleigh listens, staring up at the great red behemoth with three arms. She isn’t necessarily an American favorite, but due to years of media coverage Raleigh’s familiar with the way she fights and her triplet pilots. Even among the Jaeger pilots, where the unusual seems to be the norm, Crimson Typhoon is one of a kind. “Very effective.”

“Hell yeah,” Raleigh mutters as they stride briskly past a basketball court where three identical brothers are playing ball, making a mental note to speak with them later. Right now, he’s more than a little flustered, but if they’re going to be running missions together he wants to at least be on speaking terms with his fellow Jaeger pilots.

Pentecost gestures at a rather crudely-built Jaeger on the opposite side of the hangar, taller than the others and a gunmetal gray color with rough proportions. “That tank? Last of the T-90s. Cherno Alpha. First generation Mark I. Heaviest, oldest Jaeger in the service.”

Raleigh thinks Cherno Alpha still looks like she could do some serious damage, for all her age, and he definitely wouldn’t want to be the kaiju on the other side of a battle from her. He’d met her pilots, Sasha and Aleksis Kaidanovsky, once or twice when they came to teach at the Academy, and again some years after he and Yancy had killed Yamarashi. They’d been kind to him—a bit rough around the edges, but looking at Cherno Raleigh thinks they fit their Jaeger like pieces of a puzzle clicking together.

“The Kaidanovskys were on perimeter patrol. The Siberian Wall went unbreached for over six years under their watch,” Pentecost says, pausing for a moment to let the burly blondes approach.

Sasha gives him and Mori a deep nod of respect, while Aleksis grunts, then both simultaneously turn their attention to Raleigh. It doesn’t take long for the flicker of recognition to flare and then Sasha thrusts out a meaty hand that Raleigh takes, lipstick a dark slash highlighting her murderous grin. “Becket boy! Is good to see you,” she booms, grip threatening to crack Raleigh’s bones. “Been too long, da?”

“It’s good to see you too, Sasha. Aleksis,” he adds with a deep nod of respect to the man, because Aleksis Kaidanovsky does not talk to many people, but he is just as much of a presence as his wife.

The man grunts again, but this time there’s a distinctly pleased tone to the sound.

Sasha squeezes his hand once more before letting go, leaning into Aleksis’ side and still smiling grimly. “We will go now. But find us later, da? Many things to talk about, lot of time has passed.”

Raleigh agrees, because he’s not stupid enough to argue with a woman who can break him in half without ever breaking a sweat. Then the Kaidanovskys move off, presumably to get out of their heavy armor, and Pentecost ushers them past Cherno’s feet as he catches sight of something—or some _one_ , Raleigh thinks with a little childish shudder—and heads over towards the third Jaeger.

“Herc? Chuck! Welcome to Hong Kong,” Pentecost booms. Raleigh catches sight of a discreet smile in the curl of Mori’s mouth, the way her chin ducks down and blue tips swish forward to hide her face.

“Max? C’mere. You remember me?” she asks, kneeling down to pet at the bulldog that suddenly trots over to her.

“Don’t drool all over Miss Mori,” Hercules Hansen orders the dog, walking over to join them. His accent is just as strong as Raleigh remembers, as the reporters and sound bites make it out to be. “He sees a pretty girl and he gets all worked up.”

Pentecost introduces them stiffly, like he’d rather be doing anything else but duty is forcing him to make sure all his pilots are acquainted.

“I know ya, mate, we’ve rode together before,” Herc says.

Raleigh has talked to more people that actually know who he is in the past fifteen minutes than he did in the five years he was on his own. It’s exhausting, but at least he knows Herc from before, knows him and respects him, has at least a little bit of common ground with the guy. He has the memories of both his and Yancy’s hero-worship of the man, because Hercules Hansen had entered their lives at a time when their reliable father-like figures were at an all-time low. “We did, sir, I remember. Three Jaeger drop.”

“Yeah, Manila. I’m sorry about your brother.”

He nods, because there’s nothing good to say to that. Mentions of Yancy don’t cut him to the core like they used to, which is lucky because Raleigh has a feeling there isn’t going to be anything else said to him for a while. Everyone here knows the story, knows how Raleigh got his brother killed and then ran away instead of facing it, and everyone thinks they’ve got the right to say something about it to him.

Pentecost intervenes before the conversation can deteriorate further. “Herc and Chuck’re running point for us on the mission in Striker Eureka. First and last of the Mark Vs. Australia decommissioned her a _day_ before the Sydney attacks.”

“Was lucky we were still around,” Herc mutters.

Raleigh finds his attention has been snagged by larger concerns. “Running point on what? All you’ve told me is that you want me to pilot a Jaeger again. Which, may I remind you, is an exceedingly bad idea.”

“The doctors can get you back up to one hundred percent mobility, Mr. Becket,” Pentecost snaps without care for the suddenly curious looks Mori and Herc exchange, then sighs. “We’re going for the Breach. Gonna strap a 2400 pound nuclear warhead to Striker’s back, with the detonation equivalent of 1.2 million tons of TNT. And you, and two other Jaegers, will be running defense for them.”

“I thought we were the Resistance? Where’d you even get something like that?” Raleigh asks, because somewhere along the way from the Wall his wires must have gotten a little crossed.

“The Russians,” Mori interjects quietly. “They can get anything.”

Pentecost nods in agreement, apparently done with the tour. “Herc, shall we?”

“Good to have you back, kid,” Herc says, and Raleigh nods back at him as the two older men walk away.

Mori coughs to gain his attention, every movement polite and contained. But there’s something Raleigh still doesn’t understand, and he shouldn’t be addressing it in front of a cadet. It wouldn’t do to undermine anyone else’s faith in Stacker Pentecost, even if his own is more than a little cracked. “Just a second, Miss Mori,” he says, and turns to jog after the older men. “Marshal!”

Pentecost turns and arches an imperious eyebrow at him.

“Sir, we’ve hit the Breach before. Nothing goes through. What’s changed?”

“I’ve got a plan, and I need you ready,” Pentecost says. That’s it. Nothing more, no elaborate explanation intended to convince Raleigh it’s worth sticking around for, no assertions that they’ll get him a functional copilot to fight with, just calm military precision and that information-is-on-a-need-to-know-basis attitude that had driven him mad before. “Come on, Herc.”

The men walk away, leaving Raleigh feeling abruptly like a disobedient child. He hunches his shoulders, feeling the burn in his bad arm spike rapidly, and stares after Pentecost until a quiet voice breaks him out of his thoughts.

“I will show you to your Jaeger now, Mr. Becket,” Mori says, and turns to walk back out of the Jaeger hangar.

Raleigh follows in her wake, suddenly in need of a grounding presence. In the absence of his brother, Raleigh isolated himself, drowning in guilt and grief and alcohol and all the memories that had gotten tangled up in the Drift. Now, however, back in a Shatterdome with no alcohol in sight and his grief a mostly healed wound, he suddenly needs to not be alone. To be with someone who understands, someone who is Drift-compatible, that he can feel in his mind like a balm on skin that’s been exposed to the biting winter wind too long.

As terrifying a thought as it is, Mako Mori is rapidly becoming that person.

She leads him down several hallways and up a flight of stairs, calm silence floating between them that Raleigh feels no need to break. Whatever preconceptions she’d had of him, they’d quickly been thrown aside—he can sense the weight of her gaze on him from time to time, curious and just a little bit confused, and it brings a lightness to his heart that hasn’t been there since before Knifehead.

“Your Jaeger, Mr. Becket,” Mori says at last, showing him through one last set of doors until he can step onto a balcony overlooking a second, interconnecting Jaeger hangar. Welding sparks fly through the air and the whirr of power tools is thick around them, but Raleigh only has eyes for the beauty standing proud before him.

Regal blue paint and that lurid orange visor Yancy had nearly cried over, she’s all strong lines and clean edges, screaming beauty and grace and power without even a hint of movement. “Oh my god. Look at her.” She looks lonely, Raleigh thinks, like he wasn’t the only one who spent five years cut off from the world, from the things he knows and loves. She looks like she needs a familiar touch to coax her back to life, needs someone who knows her quirks and intricacies. How her right hip sticks a little more than the left, because Raleigh had a bigger stride than Yancy. How the Conn-Pod is probably still half-full of the candy they’d stashed in her one day on a training run because they got hungry after Drifting and didn’t always have the patience to make it back to the cafeteria. How the mag-locks always refuse to open from the inside, and anyone in the Conn-Pod has to be let out manually. How anyone who connects to her will get a rush of memories from both Becket brothers, burned into her AI by those long hours of piloting solo, burning alive, just him and his girl and their pain, their loss. “Gipsy Danger.”

Her name, so long shoved aside in his mind, can’t contain the rush of emotion Raleigh feels at looking upon his Jaeger again.

“So beautiful,” Raleigh whispers, leaning his body against the railing in front of him and wishing he could cross his arms across his chest. “God, she looks like new.”

Mori moves to stand next to him, hugging her clipboard to her chest. “Better than new. She has a double core nuclear reactor. She is one of a kind, now.”

“She always was,” Raleigh whispers, because Gipsy had been his, his and Yancy’s, their escape from a world that didn’t want them, their future, their _home_. Strapping into her harnesses had been like getting a warm hug from his mom, like seeing Jaz healthy and hale again, like their family hadn’t ever splintered apart. She’s the only material object he would never willingly give up, aside from Yancy’s sweaters, and seeing her is the final lock on the door keeping him here.

Raleigh’s committed now, because like hell is he gonna let two green-faced cadets climb into _his girl_ and fight kaiju.

“How do you like your ride, Becket boy?” a familiar voice suddenly asks from behind them, and Raleigh’s heart lurches in his chest for the second time today. “She’s got all the latest tricks—iron hull, weapons updates, and a new fluid synapse system. I hear she’s also got a pilot now.”

He can’t contain the smile threatening to split his face apart. Goddamn, but he’s missed the idiot. “Tendo!” he says warmly, and wraps the shorter man in as good of a hug as he can give with only one arm. Tendo, displaying just as much sensitivity as he had when Raleigh was recovering from Knifehead, adjusts his hold accordingly so that Raleigh’s bad arm and shoulder are never put under pressure.

“I want you to know that a message on my phone every eight months is not staying in touch,” Tendo tells him sternly when they finally break apart.

Raleigh ducks his head, suddenly shamefaced. “Yeah, sorry,” he mutters. “Wasn’t in the mood for conversation.”

“I know, which is why I didn’t push the issue or use my mad skills to hunt you down and beat some sense into you. I figured the occasional message was better than no word at all. But, now that you’re here, you better believe I’m gonna keep an eye on you. Make sure you’re eating, behaving yourself, getting checked out by Medical, just like Yancy would’ve wanted,” Tendo says, and there’s a forgiving smile on his face. He claps Raleigh on the shoulder, then turns and disappears back into the chaos that is LOCCENT before Raleigh can protest that he can take care of himself. Has been doing it for five years. Got really damned good at it.

When he turns to see where she’s gotten off to, Mori smiles at him. A real, honest-to-god smile, not the tiny shadow he’d seen earlier. Silhouetted by Gipsy Danger with the tips in her hair gleaming blue, she’s the most gorgeous thing Raleigh’s ever seen. His breath stutters in his chest, warm and unmoving, and he knows this moment is going to be burned into his memory like the first time he and Yancy Drifted.

It feels like new beginnings and the turn of the seasons and that moment when the tilt of the earth and the clear of the sky turns everything he sees to gold.

It feels like a sunrise.

 

“If I may ask, what did you do to your arm?” Mori asks on the way to Raleigh’s room, her strides brisk and businesslike along the hallways. She flicks a glance at the arm Raleigh’s got tucked close to his body, and Raleigh can see the glint of curiosity there from when he’d asked her to walk on his left in a preemptive attempt to protect his bad side from the traffic of the Shatterdome.

He stops abruptly, staring after her in shock.

Mori continues on only a couple steps before she turns, arching an impatient brow at him. “What?”

“You don’t know?” Raleigh manages to put words to the feeling, the tumultuous assault that’s suddenly crashing against his ribs. He hadn’t thought he would have to explain, thought that the story of Raleigh Becket’s fall from grace would be old hat around the Shatterdomes. He isn’t ready to explain, not to these people, these techs and pilots who know what all of it really means.

“No,” Mori says. “Should I?”

He shrugs with his good shoulder. “Thought everybody would know, big story like that. Especially since it would’ve been in all my medical files. If you handpicked my Drift potentials, you would’ve had access to them.”

“There was nothing in your medical files, Mr. Becket, just the damage you took in the battle with Knifehead,” Mori says politely.

Raleigh has to laugh at that. “This _is_ the damage from Knifehead.” He twitches his left elbow just enough to indicate what he means, barely an inch of movement, and has to catch his breath as pain flares through his entire body. Fuck, but it hasn’t been this bad since the last anniversary of the battle.

Mori blinks, eyes raking over him in a way that tells Raleigh she’s seeing a lot more than just the surface, connecting dots and puzzle pieces that hadn’t fit together before. Then she smiles, the brief political smile she gave him back on the landing pad in the middle of a monsoon. “I would expect that after five years it would have healed more,” she says, and continues moving through the Shatterdome to the Rangers’ quarters. Down two more hallways after that, she comes to a stop in front of a round door that looks no different from the others and unlocks it. “This is your room.”

“Thanks.” Raleigh steps up past her and swings the door open, continuing inside without pausing to really take in the details. It’s a little bit bigger than the room he’d shared with Yancy, although that could be an illusion caused by the lack of bunk beds, and with one glance Raleigh can tell that the bathroom is just as shitty here as it was at the Icebox. He slings his bag down on the bed one-handed, and starts unpacking with the ease of practice. He’s packed up and moved on and briefly settled down only to repeat it all again so many times that by now, it’s become rote. “Anything else on the schedule for today?”

Mori shakes her head. Raleigh can just catch the movement out of the corner of his eye. “Just the standard medical checks. If they clear you, we will start the compatibility tests tomorrow morning.”

“Okay,” Raleigh says, openly accepting, and clumsily digs his stack of photos out of the bottom of the duffel. Because he’s curious, and because the longer he spends in Mori’s presence the less alone he feels in his head—and that’s terrifying enough, feeling someone else after so many years of isolation, and Raleigh is so fucking thankful that she can’t feel him in return—he asks, “Pentecost said you were one of the best. Restoring old Jaegers and showing has-beens like me around, that can’t be everything you do. Are you a pilot?”

“No, but I want to be one more than anything.”

Raleigh glances at her, leaning against the shitty Shatterdome mattress with an open smile on his face. “What’s your simulator score?”

“Fifty one drops. Fifty one kills.” Mori hugs her clipboard tighter to her chest self-consciously.

He lets out a low whistle. “Impressive. But you’ve never logged time in an actual Jaeger?”

“No.” Mori ducks her head a little. “And I am not one of the candidates for tomorrow.”

Shit. There go all Raleigh’s half-made plans. “That’s a shame. I was starting to look forward to sparring with you.”

This time, the blush is a little more obvious. “The Marshal has his reasons,” she says quietly.

Ah. So it’s not that she doesn’t want to Drift with him, it’s that Pentecost won’t let her. Raleigh can work with that. He hasn’t met any of the other candidates yet, but Mori is slowly but surely seeping her way into his brain and Raleigh doesn’t know if he’ll be able to find anyone with as good of a connection as he’s already found, here, without even trying. If he wants to take the risk with anyone else. “Yeah, he always does,” Raleigh mutters, but the words don’t stick in his throat like they used to. He’s mostly forgiven Pentecost for trying to send him off on a world tour only a week after he got out of the hospital, but there’ll always be a small kernel of resentment deep in his heart.

“I hope you approve all my choices.” Mori takes a deep inhale. “I have extensively studied all your fighting techniques, ev-even Alaska.”

Raleigh nods. He expected nothing less—Mori seems like the kind of perfectionist to refuse to do something unless she can do it _her_ way, to the best of her ability, and then blow everyone else out of the water. “And what do you think?”

“I think…you are unpredictable. You have a habit of deviating from standard combat techniques. You take risks and injure yourself and your crew. I don’t think you’re the right man for this mission,” Mori says, her eyes meeting his boldly. She is unafraid of him, refuses to stand in awe of him, tells him her opinions bluntly and without fear of consequences.

_Good_ , Raleigh thinks. It’s been a long time since he had someone to rein him in.

So he takes a leap of faith. “I don’t think I am, either,” Raleigh confides in her. “But Pentecost said there wasn’t anybody else, and everything that’s happened in the past five years doesn’t mean I’m not still a Ranger. In battle, you make decisions. And you have to live with the consequences.” He studies her for a moment, suddenly looking so very young and mortified. “Thank you for your honesty, though.”

Mori gives him another shallow bow, blush still highlighting her cheekbones. “I will come get you when it is time to go to Medical. Until then, you should get some rest.” Then she makes a quick turn and crosses the hallway, opening the door directly across from his.

If that isn’t subtle copilot matchmaking the Marshal probably doesn’t know about, then Raleigh doesn’t know what is. What he _does_ know, however, is that Mako Mori is a mystery, and she’s got a level of Drift compatibility with him that Raleigh hasn’t felt since he was back in the Academy with Yancy.

And if he doesn’t want the connection to end, well, who could blame him? Raleigh’s been alone in his head so long he almost can’t remember what it’s like to have someone constantly there, to be able to reach out with just a brush of his mental fingers and find his brother, anywhere, anytime. He misses that, misses Drifting, misses the connection intrinsic between copilots. Is terrified, actually, by how much he misses it.

He leaves the door open, almost not even realizing it until a flicker of surprise roils through him and he has to glance in the direction of Mori’s door.

She’s staring at him, wide eyed with shock and a sudden sorrowful understanding.

Raleigh looks down, registers that she’s taking in the scars the circuit-suit had burned into his side and arm—scars he doesn’t register all that much anymore, his arm is more than enough of a reminder of what he’s lost—and then gives Mori a tiny smile before she pretty much slams the door shut and he follows suit before it can get awkward. Or any _more_ awkward, as the case may be.

 

True to her word, Mori comes to retrieve him two hours later. Raleigh had actually managed about an hour of sleep, and spent the rest of the time staring at the ceiling and trying to convince himself, _again_ , that he’s doing the right thing, that he deserves to be here.

She smiles when he opens the door, though it is tinged with a frustration that looks alien on her previously collected features. The silence that falls between them on their way to Medical is surprisingly comfortable. Raleigh feels like he’s said all he needs to say, has explained everything of importance, and now just basks in the feeling of not being alone in his head anymore.

The doctor, a heavily pregnant woman with a nametag reading Dr. Vanessa Gottlieb, takes one look at him when he swaggers through the doors and scowls, pointing imperiously to a bed in one of the closer rooms. “Sit,” she instructs, and swans off to find whatever pieces of medical equipment Raleigh assumes will be needed.

He gives Mori an uncertain look—Raleigh has never been comfortable around doctors, and usually it took the full force of Yancy to keep him around after drops long enough to get checked out—but she only frowns at him. A ‘well, what are you waiting for?’ frown that nevertheless gets his ass in gear.

So Raleigh sits through the doctor’s poking and prodding, all the scans and tests she can think to do. Then Dr. Gottlieb—and hey, isn’t that the name of the fussy scientist from the elevator?—scowls at him. “When was the last time you were seen by a doctor? And I don’t mean some half-rate hack at the Wall, I’m talking a real, qualified doctor. Who would know what to do with brain scans like yours.”

He swallows. “Uhh…not since I left the Shatterdome?”

“Not since—” Dr. Gottlieb appears to be making a very concerted effort not to scream at him. Raleigh appreciates it, he really does. “You haven’t been seen by a doctor in _five years?”_

“No?”

She smacks him on the back of the head with her test results, and when Raleigh looks over to the door he sees Mori covering a smile with her hand. “Idiot boy!” Dr. Gottlieb seethes. “What were those doctors thinking? Not only should they not have let you out of Medical for another two weeks at _least,_ no one should have let you walk out of the Shatterdome at all! You have _brain damage_ , you thick-skulled robo-cop, who knows what could’ve happened! You could’ve had a stroke, you could’ve seized, no one knew what to expect at the time because _you, Raleigh Becket, were the first one to go through something like that!_ ”

“In my defense, Pentecost wanted me out as soon as possible so he could send me on a World Tour,” Raleigh says, as mildly as he can. Which isn’t very mild at all, because he’s still bitter about it.

Dr. Gottlieb glares at him. “I don’t care if the goddamn kaiju were knocking on our door and you were the last Jaeger pilot left in the world, there is no way you should’ve been released that soon,” she hisses. “Because if you hadn’t, maybe we would’ve been able to do something about that arm of yours.”

Raleigh’s breath stops in his chest. “W-what?”

“There’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry, but you’re stuck like that,” Dr. Gottlieb tells him bluntly.

“But—” Raleigh flails for words, feeling like the ground’s suddenly been ripped out from under his feet when it wasn’t all that steady to begin with. “Pentecost said you could fix it!”

“And maybe we could’ve, if it hadn’t happened five years ago. But no matter how good I am, I can’t regrow nerve cells. Once those suckers’re gone, we’re stuck,” she explains.

“But I’ve got motion! I can feel stuff, I can move my arm! It’s not dead!” he protests, demonstrating his left arm’s full range of motion, however limited it may be. He can’t raise anything above his shoulder, and his wrist is stuck in pretty much one position, but Raleigh can occasionally grasp things and his arm doesn’t look like a dead fish and that’s all that really matters to him.

Dr. Gottlieb isn’t fazed. “And it’s impressive that you’ve regained that much, because most of the pilots who experienced similar injuries to yours never recovered that well unless they were on a serious drug and physical therapy regimen. But there is nothing _I_ can do to reverse the nerve damage.” She hesitates, slants a glance between him and a wide-eyed Mori in the doorway. “I’m sorry, Ranger Becket. I know how much this meant to you.”

_No, you don’t_ , Raleigh wants to scream, _because you’ve never lost your entire world and then had the possibility of getting most of it back thrown in your face, only to find out it was all a lie._

He doesn’t scream.

Doesn’t even raise his voice.

Just slides to his feet, bad arm clutched close to his body, and walks out the door. “Thanks for trying, Doc,” he mutters, but it’s more out of a sense that she’ll kick his ass if he says anything else, pregnant or not. Mako walks alongside him out of Medical, a steady ungrudging presence, and Raleigh really needs to stop hanging out with her if she’s not going to be one of the copilot candidates tomorrow because he’s starting to feel more than a little dependent on her.

Pentecost’s office is on the way to the mess hall, apparently—either that, or Mori is very, very good at making detours feel like the only way to get somewhere—and he coughs a gruff “Enter” when she knocks on his door. “Yes, Miss Mori?” he asks, looking up at them.

Mori sits primly in one of the chairs in front of his desk, but Raleigh is too riled up to do anything but pace restlessly across the span of Pentecost’s office. His emotions are a chaotic jumble—rage, betrayal, frustration, and something that feels suspiciously like disappointment—and he can’t meet the older man’s eyes. “We have just returned from Medical,” Mori says with a forced calm that Raleigh feels like a command in the back of his mind, like those times when Yancy demanded he _settle the fuck down already, kid, we got an impression to make_.

Slowly, grudgingly, he does, drifting to a halt right behind her chair.

Pentecost’s eyebrow does not raise at this. Not even the slightest bit. “I see,” he says. “And?”

“The docs can’t do anything,” Raleigh grumbles. “There’s no way they’ll clear me. I can’t pilot again. You’ll have to find someone else.”

Pentecost sighs, gathering a stack of papers into his hands, and then Raleigh _has_ to look at him. “I already told you, there is no one else.”

“Sir, I don’t know what game you think you’re playing, but I can’t climb back into Gipsy’s Conn-Pod like this,” he says, tone verging on outright disrespectful.

Pentecost doesn’t look like he cares either way, like he’s got way more important things to be dealing with than another Raleigh Becket temper tantrum. And hell, maybe he does. Running a Resistance can’t be easy. His eyes are hard and flinty, and a voice in the back of Raleigh’s mind starts screaming danger in flashing neon lights. “Can you fight?” he demands of Raleigh.

“Yes,” he snaps back, because Raleigh has never been the kind of person to let anything keep him down, not even his own body rebelling against him. He had let Knifehead take too much from him, been determined to get it back, fought and scraped and struggled to get to where he is now. But he knows that there are some boundaries not meant to be broken, some things you can’t crawl back to no matter how desperately you want to. “Yes, I can still fight.”

Pentecost nods decisively, face stern and eyes like steel daggers. “We’re the resistance. We don’t play by the same rules as we used to, and we don’t have to meet the same standards. Now, I need a pilot with experience to get in that Jaeger, Ranger Becket, and you’re the only one we’ve got.” He rises from his chair and leans forward on the desk, ferocious determination radiating from every line of his crisp military suit. “And if I say you’re piloting again, then you’re damn well gonna pilot again. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Raleigh doesn’t quite snap off a sarcastic salute, but it’s a near thing.

Pentecost nods sharply, sitting back down and going back to whatever paperwork is covering his desk. Mori gives the Marshal an elegant bow, rising from her chair with contained grace, and heads for the door in acceptance of the silent dismissal.

And Raleigh?

Raleigh follows her, because he doesn’t know what else to do.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so. hi guys. it's been a while, hasn't it?  
> here are the facts: all but the last scene of this chapter has been sitting on my laptop for almost a year. I was attempting to write said last scene when I thought, not for the first time, that I am not the person who should be telling this story, because it involves things that are beyond my frame of reference. work got crazy, life got crazy, I jumped between a lot of fandoms. and then I found myself drawn back to this fic, and I realized that I might not be the one who should tell this story, but I'm the one who IS telling this story, and that it shouldn't go untold just because it's a challenge for me.  
> in short, i'm going to finish this. it might take a few months, it might take another year, but eventually it will be done. a thousand thanks to anybody who saw this and thought it looked interesting, to Kate and Zoe for keeping their eyerolls to themselves, and to Haley for beta'ing this (all 16 pages, I know, I'm SORRY)

Disappearing off the face of the planet for five years or not, Raleigh does actually have a sense of self-preservation. It’s for this reason, and absolutely no other, that he clears his throat a few corridors away from the mess hall and says quietly, “I can find my way from here.”

Mori looks startled at this. “I—oh. Very well, Mr. Becket.”

“I don’t mean to offend, just think I need to get used to navigating around one of these again,” Raleigh offers with a shallow bow. “After all, can’t expect you to put aside your work just to guide me around all day, now can I?”

“No,” Mori agrees with a small smile, and Raleigh thanks every god he doesn’t believe in anymore that this seems to have alleviated her previous discomfort.

“Thank you, Miss Mori,” he says, and walks the remaining distance to the mess hall on his own. Once inside, Raleigh is almost immediately overwhelmed by the sheer amount of _noise_ , let alone the people coming and going from the large hall. LOCCENT techs, scientists, and the Jaeger crews are all bustling back and forth, jostling for seats and better food offerings.

He takes a deep breath, steels his nerves. Raleigh Becket didn’t climb outta the pit he’d been in only to shy away from a little social interaction, now did he? Besides, it’s nothing he hasn’t dealt with before.

Sasha and Aleksis give him a simultaneous nod of acknowledgment when he glances over to the Russian table, but Raleigh can’t quite stomach the thought of eating with them just yet. It was more than enough to realize that almost all the pilots he knew, all the ones he fought with and shed kaiju blood with, all the ones who would really _know_ what it meant for him to still be connected to Yancy when he died, were dead and gone now. He didn’t need the reminder, just a meal and to curl up in his room until the shock wore off.

One of the Wei Tang brothers knocks into Raleigh’s shoulder as he walks past—and oh yeah, Raleigh will have to do some serious damage control there, he’s calling it right now—and the various assorted Jaeger techs give him nervous looks. Fuck. Looks like he’ll be sitting alone again after all.

But then Herc Hansen descends from some stairs in the middle of fucking nowhere, two trays of food held in his hands, and calls out. “Hey, Becket! Why don’t’chu eat with us today?”

“I—I’m okay, thanks, I’m gonna go find a corner out of the way,” he stammers, but the older man isn’t having any of it. A tinge of determination in the forceful presence swirls over Raleigh’s mind. It feels a bit like Ghosting with Yancy, with Mori, but on a much weaker level.

“Oh, c’mon, there’s plenty of room at our table.” Herc shoves one of the trays into Raleigh’s chest, practically forcing him to take it, and keeps walking like it’s expected for Raleigh to trail after him.

He does, staring down at the selection of foods he hasn’t seen in a good four years, maybe even five. Says as much, awkwardly settling next to Herc at a table with a good line of sight to the door.

Herc smiles as he sits, grabs his fork and starts shoveling beans—real beans, none of that instant crap they’d had at the Wall when Raleigh could spare the supplies from making various soups and gruels—into his mouth. “Hong Kong. Advantages of an open port—there’s no rationing. Sweet peas, corn, beans, even the occasional decent meatloaf, s’all good. Pass the potatoes?”

Raleigh awkwardly reaches across himself to grab the pan of mashed potatoes, passing it to Herc before planting his left elbow on the table in an effort to look more normal and digging in. It’s good, flavors bursting across his tongue, and he instantly hunches over his tray, a reflex from innumerable days spent at the Wall where not eating fast enough loses you food to other starving men.

Chuck Hansen watches him grouchily from across the table, but it isn’t until Raleigh’s got his mouth full of food that he speaks up. “So. You’re the guy. You’re the guy who’s gonna run defense for me in that old rust bucket of yours.”

Raleigh’s put up with a lot of shit in his day, both before and after he left the PPDC. He’s heard the tone Chuck’s taking from countless other men, all self-entitled little shits just looking for a fight. Most of ‘em just wanna prove something to the world, don’t care that he’s disabled—they’re just looking for a fight. Somehow, he doesn’t think that’s the case here. Not that it matters either way, because Raleigh’s supposed to be putting on a good show to convince people Pentecost’s crazy manhunt was worth it. He’s supposed to be behaving himself.

But _nobody_ calls Gipsy a rust bucket and gets away with it.

His eyes narrow. A familiar throaty growl echoes in his ears. “That’s what Pentecost says.”

“Good.” Chuck leans down, feeds a scrap of food off his tray to the bulldog drooling at his feet. “And when’s the last time you jockeyed, Ray?”

“About five years ago.” Raleigh forces back the curtain of memories that threaten to surge up at his words, too distracted to really pay attention to the intentional misnaming.

Chuck glares at him. “And what’ve you been doing for five years? Must’ve been something pretty important, to keep you away from your Jaeger.”

“I was at the Wall,” Raleigh says evenly, meeting the kid’s eyes without flinching. Youngest pilot ever or not, Chuck’s nothing but a cocky kid, all bark and very little bite. Raleigh’s taken on worse in the days just after Yancy’s death, when he’d been making a very dedicated effort to destroy his liver and figure out how to fight again with only one arm.

“Oh, that’s great. That’s…really useful,” Chuck sneers. “If we get into a fight, you can build our way out of it, eh, Ray?”

“It’s Raleigh.”

“Whatever,” Chuck says, and pushes back from the table with all the swagger that Raleigh used to see in the mirror every day. “Look, you’re Pentecost’s bright idea. My old man seems to like ya, but it’s guys like you that brought down the Jaeger Program in the first place. You slow me down, I’m gonna drop you like a sack of kaiju shit. See you around, _Rah_ leigh.” He turns on his heel and leaves without a backward glance, only a low whistle to summon Max, who barks and trots after him.

Raleigh stares, but only because Chuck’s just told him everything the guilty part of his mind whispers in the long dark when he’s aching and unable to sleep.

Next to him, Herc sighs. “Real charmer, that one. You can blame me for it. Raised him on me own. Smart kid, but I never knew whether to give him a hug or a kick in the ass.”

“With respect, sir? I’m pretty sure which one he needs,” Raleigh mutters. Herc doesn’t physically react, but he can sense the man’s amusement like an eddy of Drift between them. It’s nowhere near as strong as what he’d felt with Mako, but there have been rumors floating around the PPDC for years about how Herc has piloted every generation of Jaeger ever built, how he’s universally compatible, how he can Drift with just about anyone. Somehow, Raleigh isn’t surprised to feel their low compatibility. It’s probably what makes him mutter, dropping his shoulders and sighing, “But he’s right. I’m a liability.”

“Cause you haven’t jockeyed in five years?” Herc shakes his head. “Naw, mate. Being a Ranger, it gets under your skin, in your veins. You can’t forget how to pilot.”

Raleigh flicks a glance up at the older man, sees a familiar flash of blonde hair out of the corner of his eyes. “Doesn’t mean I won’t be absolute shit at it. That last fight messed me up _bad._ ”

“But the point is that you can still fight,” Herc says sternly.

He wants to believe it. Probably needs to believe it. But the longer Raleigh spends at the Hong Kong Shatterdome, so similar to the Icebox, the more unbalanced he can feel his mind come. The flashes of Yancy are coming faster now, and the doctors can’t do anything for his arm. Even the memory of seeing Gipsy again, restored and so goddamn _gorgeous_ Raleigh can’t breathe for thinking of her, isn’t enough to convince him that climbing back in the Conn-Pod is a good idea.

But Pentecost has ordered, and Raleigh’s spent enough time shirking his duties. He will obey.

That doesn’t mean he has to like it.

So Raleigh mutters some form of agreement and scoops his tray into his good hand, hauling himself to his feet and slinking back along mostly deserted hallways until he’s in the privacy of his own room. He savors the food, has enough sense for that much at least, then spends the rest of the evening alone with his thoughts and the memories of Yancy that still have the power to suspend reality.

When he’s finally exhausted from pacing and one-armed pushups and any other exercise he can do without leaving the tiny confined space, Raleigh bundles himself under the covers and strains for sleep.

 

He dreams of flying through the air, of bones snapping like toothpicks in the devil’s grasp, of a sharp impact and then slowly falling, fighting for breath, trying to claw his way back to the only light in the darkness, screaming voicelessly _raleighraleighraLEIGHRALEIGH—_

 

He wakes.

 

The glowing numbers on the alarm clock read 3:42 AM. Obscenely early, even for a man suffering from chronic insomnia for the past five years. Raleigh heaves a disgruntled sigh, knowing he has no chance of falling back asleep tonight, and hauls himself into the shower. At least the water’s hot, steam curling through the air and the spray beating down on Raleigh’s aching body, burning away his brother’s last memories and filling up all the hollow spaces inside him with warmth.

It won’t last, but Raleigh enjoys the feeling nonetheless.

When he can’t stomach the scalding temperature for even a moment more, he shuts the shower off and gets dressed in PPDC sweatpants and boots and a ragged wifebeater, throwing one of Yancy’s increasingly worn lumpy sweaters over top of it. Then he goes for a walk, wandering aimlessly through the deserted halls of the Shatterdome until it’s a more reasonable time of morning and he can expect someone else to actually be awake.

Luckily, Marshal Pentecost tracks him down around 5:30, Mori trailing at his side with her clipboard like a shadow, and tells him to get ready for Compatibility Trials in the Kwoon at 0600 hours.

Raleigh doesn’t argue, just follows along after them and starts getting warmed up for what’s sure to be a long day of sparring. It feels weird to use a hanbō after so many years, even using a considerably shorter stick than he’s used to, and fighting mostly one armed with it is sure to be an experience. But Raleigh’s long past the point of feeling ashamed of his injury, and all these people know about it anyways, so he’ll just do the best he can.

At least, he thinks everyone knows about it.

He really should’ve known better.

Slowly but surely, the various candidates and doctors and spectators trickle into the Kwoon, ringing the walls and talking lowly amongst themselves like this is the greatest entertainment to happen in several months. Hell, for all Raleigh knows, it is. He catches a glimpse of the Kaidanovskys slipping into the room, bleach blonde hair gleaming under the florescent lights, and then the Wei Tangs not two minutes later. Herc’s already in the room, leaning against the wall not far from where Pentecost and Mori are standing at the head of the room.

The realization makes his breath stutter in his chest, though it’s not entirely unexpected. All pilots have an innate want to know who they’re fighting with, what to expect, so that they don’t get taken by surprise on a drop. They want to see what the crippled has-been can do.

Raleigh kind of wants to show them.

So when the first candidate steps up to face him on the mats, shoes off and hanbō spinning lazily in his hands, Raleigh takes a deep breath and centers himself like they’d taught at the Academy. When he focuses, he can feel the low scrape of the younger man’s mind against his own, rough and nowhere near the compatibility levels of Herc, let alone Mori.

(Raleigh pointedly doesn’t think about that, about how good it feels to be in the same room as her, simply breathing the same air, because for whatever reason she’s not being tested with him and he _has_ actually learned something, okay, he’s not going to push unless someone else does first.)

The cadet in front of him is cocky, overconfident, eyeing Raleigh’s obvious discomfort with the staff and smirking. Raleigh shakes his head. “One thing before we start, kids. I don’t fight like anyone you’re used to, not anymore.”

He can see the confusion in dark eyes, takes pity on the kid and drops into a stance with his staff in his right hand, bracing the other end against his opposite hip. The first blow is a mockery, really, the kid moving too fast and too sure of himself to really watch Raleigh’s response. He slams his bad shoulder into the other guy’s gut while ducking a flying wooden staff, spins around like he’s dancing on clouds and brings his hanbō to a quivering halt an inch from the guy’s neck.

The cadet stares up at Raleigh, wide eyed, looking like he isn’t quite sure what happened.

Raleigh bares his teeth.

The fight is over quickly after that, 4-1 to Raleigh, but the final move makes everyone in the room suck in a shocked breath. They’ve been out of sync for almost the whole match, but somehow the kid slips even _further_ out of alignment, mistiming Raleigh’s sideways motion and somehow smacking his hanbō into Raleigh’s deadened arm with a surprising amount of force.

He hisses in a startled breath, tucks his arm in close to his body before proceeding to finish the kid off with an almost vicious series of slashes, parries and stabs with his staff. One armed.

A round of shocked gasps goes up around the room, and when Raleigh looks just about everyone’s eyes are wide with surprise. Low mutters break the silence that falls, barely audible to his ears but all containing some element of, “What the hell happened to his arm?”

Raleigh really doesn’t want to deal with this. He’d been under the impression that his story was old news around the Shatterdomes, especially after Pentecost confirmed that similar effects had happened to other pilots who lost limbs in the Drift. He’d thought that people _knew_ , that he wouldn’t have to explain.

He doesn’t know if he can explain.

“Next candidate, please,” Pentecost calls, calm as anything, and a girl steps out of the crowd. She’s a couple inches taller than Mori, lean and flinty eyed, and Raleigh feels absolutely nothing from her. He can already tell that this bout is going to end as badly as the first.

He’s right. 4-0.

Five more guys and another girl step up to fight him, and Raleigh bats them all down with ease. They’re too stiff, too formal, and though each subsequent candidate seems to get a better feel for how Raleigh moves just by having time to watch him fight, none of them can sync up with him. And he knows, he _knows_ , his fighting style isn’t anything like what they teach at the Academy anymore, but Raleigh can’t help wishing it didn’t matter.

He’s a brawler, is the thing. Gipsy’s fighting style had been largely based on his, with Yancy’s quiet resolve strengthening their blows and turning fights into something at least resembling other Jaegers’ battles. Losing his arm had just made that habit worse, because Raleigh wasn’t going to let it beat him, wasn’t going to just sit back and let the world kick his ass, and he made a point of seeking out every fight he could. Most of that, he knows with a lurching sense of regret for his past actions, was in bars and shitholes and slimy alleyways, where the only fighting done is with fists and knives and the winner is whoever pulls a dirty trick first.

Raleigh can’t pull any dirty moves here, but these fresh-faced Academy graduates also aren’t expecting him to rely just as much on his body as the hanbō to land strikes.

He finishes off the latest match with a deft flip over his shoulder, landing with staff pointed at the candidate’s throat, and glances up just in time to see a little flicker of irritation cross Mori’s face. Next to her, Pentecost is calm and blank, but Mori is making judgments and notes on her clipboard and it rattles some part of Raleigh that he thought he’d buried a long time ago.

“Next,” Pentecost says.

Another candidate steps onto the mats, the first one to look even remotely Caucasian, and Raleigh pulls himself back into the familiar headspace. Takes the kid down hard, again and again and again, offers him a hand up when the match is over and Mori calls the score. There’s another flash of emotion on her face, gone too quick for Raleigh to read it, and against everything his gut tells him he opens his mind and feels ripples of emotions like stones skipping across a pond. Irritation, impatience, reluctant pride, dismay, an urge to prove herself that’s nearly overwhelming.

“Next,” Pentecost snaps.

Raleigh takes the next kid down even faster, feels the same ripples of emotion from behind him. “Am I not good enough for you?” he demands when it’s over, barely taking the time to help the shame-faced candidate to his feet before he turns to face the head of the room.

“W-what?” Mori stammers.

He takes a deep breath, tries to reign in the combating feelings of exhaustion and adrenaline in his limbs. It’s been a long time since he’s fought this long, this hard, for a purpose and playing mostly by the rules. He’s forgotten how exhausting it can be, fighting people who can’t sync with him. “You picked all these candidates yourself, right? But you’re critical of all the matches. So. Am I not good enough for you?”

Mori clutches her clipboard with white-knuckled hands. “You could’ve taken all of them two moves earlier,” she says delicately, an entire argument wrapped up inside the words. Just like one of Yancy’s old speeches, his brother’s warm voice whispering in his ear to _stop fucking around, kid, there’s a time for playing and this ain’t it_.

“You think so?” Part of Raleigh knows it’s wrong, to be so focused on someone who isn’t even a candidate, but Mori is the only one in the room with even a reasonable amount of compatibility with him. He can’t help it if he’s naturally more focused on her than whoever he’s facing off against, though it probably feels like a slap in the face to his opponent.

Mori scowls. “I know so.”

“Prove it.” He sweeps the hanbō out to the side, indicating the mat and turning his words to the Marshal. “Can we switch this up? I wanna face her.”

The look on Mori’s face is enough to convince him that this is the right thing, even if Pentecost’s making a face like he is going to tear Raleigh limb from limb and he is going to enjoy it. “No. We stick to the list we have already. Only candidates with Drift Compatibility will—”

“Which I have, Marshal,” Mori pleads.

Pentecost stiffens. “Mako, this is not only about a neural connection, this is also about a physical compatibility.”

  1. Raleigh thinks he might get it now. Part of it, at least. “What’s the matter, Marshal? You don’t think your brightest can keep up with a cripple?” He doesn’t mind the word so much in this context, not when it might get him what he wants. Raleigh has refused to let himself be a cripple, but he can play at being one if it gets him what he needs. And yes, he’d promised he wouldn’t push, but that was before he felt _this,_ how their compatibility outshines all the others when they aren’t even trying.



Pentecost goes all stiff and still, and Raleigh thinks for a moment he’s just crossed some very big line where he didn’t even know there _was_ a line to cross—then turns to Mori. “Go,” he says quietly, and accepts the clipboard she hands him.

Raleigh can’t bite back his grin of anticipation, watching the young woman step onto the mats and tug her boots off. She catches the staff someone tosses her, and it’s like someone flips a switch because he’s not seeing any of the versions of Mori he’s become familiar with so far. This side is dangerous, and quiet, and focused like a razor, light glancing through Raleigh’s mind the color of the highlights in her hair.

It takes no effort at all to center himself, to open his mind to hers as much as it’s possible outside of a Drift. Impossibly, this time he feels her reaching back, and a low smile curves over his face. “Remember, it’s about compatibility,” he reminds her, because that kind of laser sharp focus isn’t good for everything, and he gets the feeling Mori will plow through him like she does everything else if he doesn’t say anything. “It’s a dialogue, not a fight. You’ve seen me move—match me.”

“I won’t hold back,” Mori promises, then flows into motion like a snake.

Raleigh really can’t help himself, showing off just a bit to match her style. It’s different from what he’s used to, both sparring with Yancy and After, but the good kind of different. Refreshing. Exhilarating.

He lands the first hit, isn’t prepared for her to retaliate so fast and before he knows it, they’re tied 1-1.

Mori smiles.

Raleigh knows the initial hits are for testing each other—him moreso than her, since she’s been watching him fight all morning—but he thinks she lets him land a second one too easily. “Two – one. Concentrate,” he advises, and then has to roll a staff swing across his shoulders to avoid her evening the score. Mori is vicious when she fights, all sharp economical movements and brutal force, and Raleigh finds himself hard-pressed to mellow her out.

“Two – two. Better watch it,” she sings, drawing back into herself after nearly cracking him across the face _again_ , and then whirls around Raleigh’s shoulder-first lunge and hanbō blows until she can get enough leverage to _hurl him to the floor._

“Three-two.”

When Raleigh bounces back to his feet, he’s grinning, matched perfectly by her dagger-sharp expression even as Pentecost calls in Japanese for her to have more control. He inclines his head, inviting her to move first this time, and blocks the blow with a staff braced against his body before whipping it around towards her knees, knowing she’ll catch it and already planting his feet for the three steps back she’ll force him to take. Then they’re off, staffs clacking between them, no real hardship for Raleigh to read the lines of her body and know she’s doing the same to him. They’re not dancing, the motion is too brutal for that, but Raleigh feels like he’s floating over the floor, every iota of his attention completely focused on Mako.

He sees an opportunity and takes it, throwing her over his hip just barely gentler than she did to him what feels like a lifetime ago. Raleigh grins in her face, panting, flushed with exertion and delight, sees something of a similar nature reflected back in dark eyes. Mako’s barely back on her feet before they move again, more in tandem this time, give and take and Raleigh wants to throw his head back and crow because _she’s getting it, they’re syncing, they can do this._

This time, hitting the floor feels natural, intentionally stepping into the force of her grasp because Raleigh doesn’t think Mako knows how to back down, how to let someone win even if they’re both equals, and it’s okay to lose this match because he’s gaining so much more in return. She leans over him, kaiju blue in the wings of her hair and the crackle of her mind against his.

Mako doesn’t know how to hold the Ghost, he can immediately tell, because as soon as Pentecost growls a throaty, “Enough” this side of her is gone, hidden behind the controlled façade, drawing gracefully to her feet and letting Raleigh have enough room to do the same.

The room around them is completely silent.

“I’ve seen what I needed to see,” Pentecost says, looking impressed. Looking like he hates being impressed.

Raleigh sucks in a deep breath. Fuck his promise not to interfere; he’s attached now, he _found her_ , he’s not letting go. “Me too. She’s my copilot.”

“That’s not going to work.”

He can’t believe his ears. “Why not?” Raleigh pointedly doesn’t look at Mako, not when he can feel the dismay and something that feels like a broken promise practically radiating off of her. He doesn’t know when she became Mako in his head, as opposed to Mori, but the change feels right. Like something clicking into place that he hadn’t even known was missing.

“Because I said so, Mr. Becket,” Pentecost booms, and he seems to be saying that a lot lately. Raleigh is starting to hate those words. “I’ve made my decision. Report to LOCCENT in two hours, and find out who your copilot will be.” He turns to leave, and slowly but surely the room clears out around them.

The worst part isn’t the mutters, the whispers and stares and judgmental eyes that linger on his skin. It isn’t even how completely Pentecost dismisses him, dismisses _them_ , and walks away. No, the worst part is that Mako doesn’t stick around, doesn’t look at him, just ducks her head and grabs her boots and disappears from the Kwoon like a fucking ghost.

Raleigh growls at everyone who tries to get in his way until he can follow the fading touch of her mind against his, track her down to the hallway outside their rooms. And then he finds himself at somewhat of a loss, because while he can _feel_ their compatibility like a soothing whisper in the back of his mind, she can’t. That much is obvious when she jumps at the sound of his voice behind her, whirling to face him with alarmed eyes and hands ready to lash out, to punch and claw and draw blood.

“Mako,” he says, and tries to send calming feelings to her even though a more rational part of him whispers that it won’t work. His mind was torn open by Yancy’s death, that’s why he’s so much more susceptible to Ghosting than before, but it’s a one-way street. Which means he actually needs to vocalize what he’s feeling, in order to get them back in sync like they’d been in the Kwoon. “What was all that about? I mean, you felt it, right? We’re Drift compatible.”

“I am sorry, but there is nothing to talk about,” Mako says quietly, and turns to open the door just behind her. All her body language is contained, close and defensive, like she thinks she needs to protect herself from _him_.

He can’t believe how badly he aches to show her that she doesn’t. “That’s my room,” he points out quietly, and a pang runs through him when she just keeps running away.

“Excuse me.”

“Mako.” The word comes across like the peal of a bell, and whatever weight he puts behind it must make an impact because Mako stops in the doorway of her room, actually turns and faces him for the first time since she hurled him to the floor. “I thought you wanted to be a pilot. More than anything, you said. This is worth fighting for.”

She takes a breath. “Thank you for standing up for me.”

“We don’t have to just obey him,” Raleigh says, because as much as he tries to avoid it, when he looks at Stacker Pentecost he still sees the man who told him that he wouldn’t even have time to grieve for his brother properly, because the PPDC needed him to tell the world to keep faith in the Jaegers, because the _world_ needed him to tell them to keep faith in the Jaegers.

Hell, _Raleigh_ hadn’t had faith in the Jaegers at that point in time, fresh out of battle and feeling like he’d lost everything that mattered to him in the world, and they’d wanted to send him on a fucking world tour?

Mako shakes her head, stepping down her stairs to be at eyelevel with him. “It’s not obedience, Mr. Becket. It’s respect.” And then she disappears behind her door, two inches of solid steel between them, and Raleigh feels the lock click into place like a wall between their minds.

Well. At least that told him something he needed to know—that Mako Mori respects Marshal Pentecost more than he thinks he’ll ever be capable of, and that there is some kind of returned feeling there.

 

Raleigh spends the next two hours pacing restlessly in his room, back and forth, back and forth, trying to talk himself out of hyperventilating or panicking or what the fuck ever it is because _he’s getting in a Conn-Pod again, Gipsy’s Conn-Pod, he’s about to let someone in his head for the first time in five years and he doesn’t even know who the fuck it is, what the hell is Pentecost thinking, he can’t do this._

He throws everything in his duffel bag again, all three sweaters and Yancy’s leather jacket and two changes of clothes and a stack of photographs, thinks about taking the PPDC sheets before coming to the conclusion that they’re not worth the space he’d have to give up. Turns on his heel to leave, and actually makes it all the way to the door before he stops, quivering, on the threshold of a massive fucking life choice. Raleigh can’t do this, he can’t just open up to some stranger like this, he’s going to blow the entire Shatterdome sky high and if anyone actually makes it out alive they can blame the entire thing on Marshal fucking Pentecost because Raleigh is so done.

Except the last time he was this done with the Marshal’s bullshit, the last time he walked out of a Shatterdome, he ended up starving in a construction camp for five years, a drunken mess, barely surviving from sunup to sundown. He had nothing in the world but a threadbare duffel bag and a head full of memories. And while at the time he’d needed the space, the grieving time and the opportunity to just get away from it all, Raleigh can’t do that again.

He’s not that person anymore, Raleigh reminds himself sternly, he’s not the idiot kid and he hasn’t just lost everything he holds dear in the world.

In fact—in fact, he’s somehow managed to get a couple things _back_.

Sighing, Raleigh unpacks the duffel again, sinks back down onto his shitty mattress, puts his head in his hands. He made a promise, to God or his Jaeger or Yancy’s ghost or who the fuck ever, it doesn’t matter, he can’t leave his girl to be piloted by _two_ strangers. One is bad enough, in his opinion, so Raleigh needs to be there to make sure Gipsy’s treated right.

He still doesn’t like it, though, and spends about ten minutes fighting to get into the proper headspace to hide that from his Drift partner before thinking _fuck it,_ they’re about to have bigger problems to deal with than Raleigh’s distaste. Like the headful of memories he’s pretty sure is going to come screaming through the Drift, no matter how much he centers himself first, no matter how much he fights to keep them back.

And then it’s time to go get suited up, so Raleigh can’t second guess himself anymore. It’s probably a good thing.

 

The Drive-room techs are the same ones who’d always helped him and Yancy get ready for a Drop, somehow. Leo Valasquez and Jane Ackerman are fellow classmates from the Academy, just like Tendo, recruits who hadn’t made it to Ranger status but decided to pursue other avenues of PPDC employment. Most of the others, like Jim Forbes, had hired on solely to be a Jaeger tech, but they’ve all been there since the very beginning, that first time he and Yancy were allowed to take their girl for a walk outside.

Raleigh doesn’t know how, doesn’t know if he’s grateful or if their presence makes him even more fucking terrified, just nods back to Jim’s friendly smile and holds his arms out for Leo to start laying down his armor. Even if the circuit suit underneath is the same clingy material, the outer shell is a more flexible, updated version of the clunky suits he used to wear. Someone’s redone the whole thing in black, which Raleigh finds himself absently thankful for as he fights off a handful of memories, all the times he and Yancy had gotten prepped for piloting. The flashes behind his eyes are distracting.

Jane claps him on the shoulder when they’re all finally done, and Raleigh gives the techs a weak smile as he moves on to the waiting door of Gipsy’s Conn-Pod, hanging open like she’s been waiting for him. The smile grows, almost involuntarily, as he steps through into the space that holds so much of his life. It’s completely repaired, no sign of where Knifehead had clawed the hull open and left them exposed to the wind and rain and monsters. Most of their secret hiding stashes are empty, too, but after a few minutes of hunting around Raleigh finds a couple waterlogged candy bars hidden behind one of the secondary power conduits.

They’re probably stale and moldy after years on the ocean floor, let alone everything that came after, but just the reminder that not everything has changed is enough to keep Raleigh from pacing the walls. He stands by the right harness instead, tense and unsure, feeling simultaneously like he’s going to rattle out of his skin and that it’s too tight, stretched thin over his bony frame. “Setting harness for test mode,” he reports tersely to the LOCCENT techs on the other side of the radio. “Tendo…”

He can’t actually see into the control room, the orange visor is at the wrong angle for that, but he knows Tendo can see him when there’s no hesitation in the man’s response. “No worries, Becket Boy, I’m five steps ahead of you. We’re running all possible safety protocols, and a couple I made up on the spot just for you.”

“Good,” Raleigh says, lets the reassurance flow through him until he no longer feels like he’s about to explode. There’s a warm feeling in the back of his mind, growing so slowly he doesn’t even notice it until the AI reports the presence of the second pilot on board, like sunlight on his face after a long Alaskan winter. “I’m gonna take this side, if you don’t mind.  Somehow I think you’ll be able to move the left arm better than—”

He looks over to the other side of the Conn-Pod, and abruptly loses all the breath in his chest.

Mako beams at him, hope and delight curling into his mind, kaiju blue tips gleaming bright against the black of her Drivesuit. “Sure,” she says, and fidgets a little under his scrutiny. “Well, are you gonna say anything?”

Raleigh thinks about it for half a second, an eternity’s worth of words whirling through his mind. But no. They’ve said everything that matters already, everything that can be said prior to a Drift. “No point, you’re gonna be in my head in five minutes,” he responds, and clips himself into the harness, curling up in the warmth of Mako’s mind like he never wants to leave. Breathes in.

Breathes out.

He can do this. Whatever made Pentecost change his mind, whatever moment of sympathy or inspiration or God-driven _faith_ has convinced him to grant Raleigh this gift, Raleigh can do this. It’s the first time he’s felt this confident since the bottom fell out of his world, since a monster ripped his life apart with a deafening roar. With Mako at his side, Raleigh can do anything.

This is the feeling he takes into the Drift, holds on to with both hands as Tendo’s voice chimes in over the radio. “Neural Handshake in fifteen.”

“Remember, Mako, you’re not in a simulator anymore,” he says, because the right side of Gipsy has always been for the more experienced pilot. Yancy used to give him speeches like this all the time, just running through the litany of warnings they’d both memorized long ago in the Academy. Settling them both into the handshake. It feels right to do this for Mako, to turn around and take on the guiding role. “We’ve both got a lot of shit in our heads, and you’re gonna see it all come back up again. Don’t chase the R.A.B.I.T.s, just let ‘em flow and don’t latch on. The Drift is silence.”

Then the Drift engages, and it could be an eternity or it could be a few seconds but Raleigh can’t think.

_—He’s throwing a snowball, laughing at the face Yancy pulls after he clears the snow away—standing nervously in the doorway of her father’s forge for the first time, hardly daring to breathe—“I’m telling you, Yance, we’ll make it. We’ll do it together, and those kaiju won’t stand a chance”—she’s pouring over Jaeger manuals, searching for the answers to the next on a long list of problems plaguing Gipsy Danger—he hates the rain, takes the offered umbrella and tries not to flinch at the once-familiar feeling of a mind sliding along his own—Pentecost standing in her room, presenting her with her shoe from so long ago, hope blooming up sharp and bright before she can squash it—_

He slams back into his body, feeling every part of himself aligning to Mako’s presence like a compass finding its true north. It's like being wrapped up in a warm hug, the Drift, like Christmas mornings and the sleepy scowl on Yancy's face before 10 AM; Raleigh aches with how badly he's missed it. Mako shocks him with how easily she adapts to the Drift, letting him guide Gipsy into the standard testing poses that are burned into the AI, and the unending flicker of memories behind their eyes is nothing more than background noise until she touches on something that Raleigh hadn’t consciously thought to hide.

 _You could feel me, even before?_  

He gives a mental shrug back, floats across the Drift equivalent of _there was brain damage, I mean, I didn’t feel anything until I came back here but I also didn’t want to_ , and brings their focus back to where it needs to be. Grounded in Tendo’s voice on the coms and Gipsy humming reassuringly around both of them, welcoming him home, Raleigh relaxes. They can do this.

Gipsy’s practically purring with delight around them, her motions smooth and steady. Raleigh can feel her heart, itching to get back out there and show the world how much more they have to give, just as earnest as he is. Mako is amused by their eagerness, but Raleigh doesn’t think she has any room to talk because he can feel the weight of her need for vengeance like a burning sword in the back of his mind.

He tries not to focus on why she would need vengeance, letting the Drift flow smooth around them. He can go digging for memories later, when the stakes aren’t quite so dire, when he doesn’t have something to prove to every fucking person in the Shatterdome. Similarly, Raleigh feels her struggling to ignore the flashes of previous fights that come up, the adrenaline and fear and joy and anger that pervades all of Raleigh’s memories of the kaiju.

Raleigh presses wordless reassurance across to the part of him that is her, the part of her that is him, and guides Gipsy smoothly into the next stance. “Looking good, guys,” Tendo says, voice tinny in Raleigh’s ears. “Neural Handshake holding steady at ninety five percent.”

Mako’s flare of pleasure at this is sharp enough to let Raleigh ease off the reins a little, give his copilot some more room to maneuver. This is supposed to be a team effort, after all, and just because he’s the one with more experience doesn’t mean he can hog all the control here. Mako brushes a _thank you_ across his mind and steps up smoothly, turning Gipsy at the waist and easing them into a series of left-leading movements.

Raleigh is content to follow for the moment, relaxing into the Drift and Mako’s steady presence and Gipsy’s AI humming around them. It takes a long couple of minutes for him to realize that his left arm is moving as fluidly as it had before Knifehead, before his neural damage, mimicking Mako’s movements so they’re completely in tandem and there’s no hiccup in the Jaeger feedback. He can feel her arm like his own, is the thing, in that hazy way where it’s not completely connected and he doesn’t have a lot of fine motor control. Mako does, though, rotating their wrists and curling their fingers down one by one just because she can.

As soon as he becomes aware of it, though, stretches out to try and get a little more dexterity, a sharp pain ricochets outwards from his shoulder. Then Raleigh’s burning. He’s flashing back, can’t stop himself from snagging a passing memory, even if he knows that’s the last thing he should do. There’s a flash of blond hair at the corner of his eye and the hull is suddenly cracked open, there’s rain pouring in, a deafening roar too close for comfort, Yancy’s last words screaming in his ears and his mind, a torrent of _loveyoukidit’sokayyoucandothisIknowyoucanloveyouraleighraLEIGH_ that hasn’t gotten any less vivid after five years. Something yanks at him, heaving him out of the Conn-Pod and away from Gipsy’s gorgeous glowing frame, and Raleigh snaps back into his body as he feels Yancy’s memory of hitting the water like a slap in the face.

Mako jerks as well, echoing him, losing her balance in the Drift with a muted cry.

“Gipsy, Gipsy, you’re out of alignment, repeat, you’re out of alignment,” Tendo says sharply.

Raleigh breathes in. Holds it for five seconds, nearly an eternity. Breathes out. “No, hang on, I’m good, I’m okay, just let me control it,” he pleads. He can’t fuck this up, not now that he’s felt how much it means to Mako. Not now that he’s found someone else who can stand to be in his head. Already he’s feeling better, arm going back to that cold numbness that usually follows one of these episodes, Gipsy whirring away with an undertone that used to mean he should be worried.

“You’re stabilizing, but Mako’s still way out,” Tendo reports. His voice is tense; Raleigh’s mental picture shows his hand hovering over the equivalent of a big red abort button.

Raleigh shakes himself, spitting out whatever words come to mind to bring Mako back to him, reaches out along the Drift to where he can still feel her, shivering and gone abruptly cold and scared. He doesn’t want to know what horrors lie in her past, what has the power to send her spiraling like this, but Raleigh doesn’t know another way of yanking her out of her R.A.B.I.T. and they can’t afford to screw this up.

His sight goes abruptly dark, and when Raleigh blinks away the fuzziness behind his eyes he’s in a city, skyscrapers looming overhead with concrete dust raining from the sky. The frightened wail of a child in need echoes off the bricks around him, and Raleigh knows without thinking that it’s Mako, that he needs to go to her, that she can’t find her way out of this one alone. He’s suddenly terrified to lose her, because the touch of Mako’s mind against his is small and cold, but Raleigh follows it until he finds himself in a dingy alley.

The little girl crouching behind a dumpster doesn’t pay him any attention, too busy trying to muffle her sobs and stay out of the line of sight of the street. He momentarily wonders why—then an earth-shattering roar rips through the strangely vacant city, and Raleigh pulls a face of realization.

 _Oh_.

Of _course._

Kaiju.


End file.
